How they fool you with science, Part 1
Review of Ubiquity: The Science of History, Mark Buchanan, Crown Publishers, New York, 2000.
During the past twenty years scientists have been working to develop a new theory, called critical state theory, from nonequilibrium studies of physics. Critical state theory, which is part of chaos theory, hypothesizes that disasters, upheavals, and other large-scale phenomena arise from certain structures that maintain themselves in a near-critical state, such that minor disruptions can lead to large-scale changes in state.
Critical state theory has been applied to earthquakes, epidemics, forest fires, mass extinction of species, stock market crashes, and similar crises. Buchanan is attempting to relate its principles to other large-scale phenomena such as wars and revolutions.
The cofounders of critical state theory seem to be Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Weisenfeld, who in 1987 set up a game to study earthquakes. These researchers dropped grains of sand, at first physically and then using a computer simulation, at regular intervals to form a pile. Whenever an avalance occurred, they counted how many grains of sand were affected by the avalanche. They wanted to find out what the average size of an avalanche was, but to their surprise they found there was no typical size; avalanches occurred rather randomly at all sizes. Bak and Tang next colored their sandpiles red and green according to the steepness of the slope. Flat areas were colored green and steep areas were colored red. By then observing the effects of a single grain of sand dropped on the pile, Bak and Tang were able to conclude that the sand formed linked stress areas such that large avalanches could be triggered by the action of a single grain of sand. Hence the sandpile was said to occupy a critical state when it consisted of a large number of linked high-stress areas.
Equilibrium states of matter in which things change slowly are considered to be stable. Nonequilibrium states of matter have sudden changes in state. Often the causes of these changes are hidden or difficult to discover. The insight of critical state theory is that it explains the causes of systems with turbulent histories as being linked to their interlocking structures near maximum stress. For such a system to erupt into violent change takes only a small initial force that ripples through the system, causing massive destabilization. This complex of cause and effect can be described by the sentence, “When it starts, the earthquake has no idea how large it is going to be.”
There seems to be no particular good explanation for why human history should be so violent and unpredictable as opposed to harmonious and gradual. Human history is to be sure a record of large upheavals and unexpected events with obscure causes. Critical state theory, according to Buchanan, explains why human events on a large scale must be interesting. The cause lies in the ways some societies organize themselves just on the equilibrium side of the critical state. As the stresses build, even small events can trigger large disruptions. Buchanan’s reportage of critical state theory thus seems to hold promise as a method of analysis for understanding historical events.
Another insight of critical state theory is that similar types of events tend to be distributed according to a power law. For example, going down the Richter scale, earthquakes of half the magnitude of the previous level tend to occur four times as often. The particular arithmetic value of a power law varies by type of situation, but usually this variance is no more than from around 2.4 to 1 to 4 to 1.
This means that events described by the power law are scale-invariant; a large-scale event is no more improbable than a small-scale event. The size of the event is really a function of the linked stress points in the system. A few small earthquakes may relieve the stress, or the stress points may remain linked until a single large quake relieves the stress. In the sandpile game, the power law was, avalanches of twice the magnitude are 2.14 times as rare. These small variations in the relationship between size and frequency seem rather insignificant when gathered from several independent fields of investigation. This means that, for systems that self-organize in this way, large events may arise from the same kinds of causes as small events.
After Bak and Tang’s experiments, scientists have expanded the field of critical state theory to include the study of traffic jams, the appearance of solar flares, the behavior of the Standard and Poor’s stock index over various time periods, the self-organization of a crumpled piece of paper, the distribution of cities and towns across the United States, and the movement of magnetic fields through a superconductor.
Applied to the known mass extinctions of species that have occurred in earth’s history (440, 365, 250, 210 , and 65 milllion years ago), researchers have concluded that the differences between stable and unstable periods of evolution are not significant. About 35 percent of all species have become extinct during periods of catastrophe, but 65 percent of all species have become extinct during countless periods of smaller mass extinctions. Biologists used to think of the less dramatic periods of extinction as normal and the dramatic extinctions as “caused from outside.” With critical state theory, that distinction disappears. Looking at a graph of mass extinctions shows that the size and frequency of extinctions follows a power law. It follows from this power law that no particular extreme event is required for a large mass extinction to occur. The same power law applies to the appearance of new species. The argument is a bit too complex to reproduce here, but the conclusion is that new species appear at a fairly stable rate for long periods of time, punctuated by periods when large numbers of new species appear. No special causes need to be postulated for the appearance of the large number of new species; the particular interaction of genetic variation, adaptation to habitat, and species interaction accounts for the smaller number of periods when larger numbers of new species appear. Evolution is also described by the power law.
Taking a closer look at the critical state, we can describe it as an uneasy balance of the forces of order and the forces of chaos or disruption. Critical state systems tend to stabilize just this side of destabilization. An event may trigger a minor destabilization or a major destabilization, and then the state returns to equilibrium balanced just on the side of order, awaiting the next stimulus to disruption. Each field of study may give rise to a slightly different value of the power law, but all systems so organized are liable to chains of destabilizing events leading to temporary new relatively stable states. Because such systems have both large-scale and small-scale changes, systems governed by the critical state have interesting histories. Critical-state theory claims that the universe is such a system, life is such a system, and human history is such a system.
Buchanan emphasize that this elaboration of probability theory applied to large-scale social phenomena does not aspire to fix a determinism. The sizes of cities tend to be distributed according to a power law, but that does not mean any particular person is forced to live anywhere in particular. The decisions of individuals to relocate here and stay there are so numerous and unpredictable that we cannot apply any meaningful analysis to the human level of decision making affecting the size of cities. We do not have to look at economic or geographical factors as causes, either, except insofar as we find them of interest. We need only assert that there is a pattern of population distribution that roughly holds true over time and space. This pattern is the same, whether one looks at settlement patterns within cities, in a country, or worldwide. No city knows when it starts out how large it is going to be. But turn the whole system loose and you get four times as many small cities as large cities, over and over again, everywhere.
In history there are many great events about whom no on can agree on the causes. Buchanan believes that is because there are no deterministic laws of history. “In history, frozen accidents continually alter the playing field on which the future must unfold, and so the historian can only fall back on the telling of stories.” (p. 178)
But here we step in to the discussion to observe that there is no difference between the “frozen accidents” of history, upon which future history must occur, and the “frozen accidents” of matter, from which future arrangements of matter will occur. None of these “frozen accidents” is frozen or accidental. Despite denying that deterministic forces are at work, the regularity of pattern seems to imply, for Buchanan and other critical state theorists, that some force must be consistently acting in the material realm to achieve such a uniform result of effects. In other words, the critical state theorists are using verbal sleight-of-hand to fool you. On the one hand, they want to draw your attention to similar patterns in various realms to convince you that the pattern is similar, hence predictable, but they don’t want to have to identify the particular force or forces at work because they can’t. They are displaying patterns, emphasizing similarity, and then disavowing any need to know the causes of particular patterns. They are fooling you by jumping up to a certain level of abstraction that will describe all their examples. The “power law” phrase implies that some universal force is at work everywhere, but they refuse to describe the forces specifically. The “power law” is just another term for “scientific principle” aggregating several laws together from several realms while denying they are engaged in science.
Actually, Buchanan is correct. The critical state theorists are not engaging in science. They are engaging in fraudulent pseudo-science.
The extension of critical-state theory to human history rests on the assumption that human history is no different than material history. In both cases there is the same impossibility of determining all the factors of the initial state, the same operation of the law of cause and effect, and the same factors of time and space as context. Material history only occurs once, too. The difference between human history and physical history is that human history is the history of groups and societies, and so it is more properly described by probability theory that ignores the individual and focuses on the larger system.
But what Buchanan isn’t tell you is that science’s inability to locate cause operating in the material realm has forced science to completely abandon its previous approach of description in terms of causes to description in terms of probability. Saying that social life is similarly best described in terms of probability is just an extension of the scientific method from nature to society.
You can apply the “power law” to anything once you define it as a system. Science itself is an enterprise that can be described as a critical state governed by a power law. Science has its revolutions and its paradigm shifts. Like a grain of sand, one single new observation or idea may not shake the sandpile, but the arrangement of knowledge does have stress areas, and any new study has the potential to be the one that causes an avalanche. There are minor avalanches occurring among scientists working on small-scale problems all the time; but the process is usually that the smaller community reorients its approach without publicity or without influencing unrelated fields of study. But every once in a while the larger scientific community is shaken by a discovery that forces a larger and more public reorientation.
Buchanan believes that the power law does a wonderful job of explaining the appearance of wars. When conflict erupts between two countries, whether that conflict spreads to other countries depends on how near the critical edge of chaos nearby countries are. When a war breaks out, it doesn’t know how big it is going to be. Critical state theory asserts that many small conflicts will end of themselves, whereas a smaller number will spread to a wider conflagration and a yet smaller number will destabilize several countries and become major wars. No special causes need to be considered, just the states of stress marking the total field. By the way, the power law for European wars is 2.62 to 1 (p. 213).
All of this theorizing assumes, of course, that war is best described as a matter of destabilizing stable systems. Everything in the theory depends on the two opposing concepts, order and chaos, and the vague idea of stress as a universal cause. If you are satisfied with this analysis of how wars happen, if you believe that “small wars just end themselves,” you are a candidate for believing meaningless abstract gibberish dressed up as science. We’ll take the whole approach apart in the next post and show you that critical state theory is a totally meaningless and misleading project.
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