[ExI] The Dogs of Immortality

[The Avantguardian]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> At 04:17 PM 7/19/2008 -0700, Avant wrote:
> 
> >--- Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I can't really see a pattern here. Why should stable, low-taxing,
> > > pro-business, small Government Switzerland do so badly, for example?
> > > Why should Ireland do so well? Why should Canada do better than the
> > > US?
> >
> >Well in your opinion as a medical doctor, is there a pattern to the relative
> >growth rates of different children for example?
> 
> Stuart, that's a terrible analogy. (I hope.) Nations have homeorhetic 
> bauplans?

Yes. Most nations to date have followed a trajectory where the more nodes that
are added to the network (growth), the more centralized some nodes become
(condensation). This is the essence of the monkey pyramid in marxist states and
"the long tail" in capitalist states. It does seem to homeorhetic in the sense
that all political structures to date have tended toward oligarchy as if it
were some final developmental state prior to a radical reorganization of the
network (revolution).

The interesting question is whether this is so because there is some adaptive
advantage to the phenotype of oligarchy as a "mature state" or if it is simply
a reflection of our monkey urge to dominate our cubicle mate.

> When and by what ordained process do the growth gradients 
> saturate? (I speak loosely, you understand.)

I would say growth saturates when the central nodes can not process inputs and
outputs from the peripheral nodes fast enough to deal with competing networks.
"Should Caesar deal with with the Huns that are pillaging Gaul or the Zealots
that destabilizing Judea?" is a classic example of this. Centralized networks
have a maximum useful size after which they become unstable. Decentralized
networks are more robust and grow much bigger. Can you imagine the Internet
with but a single router?
    

Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"In ancient times they had no statistics so that they had to fall back on lies."- Stephen Leacock