Notes: Chapter 10: Entropic Societies

Chapter notes for “Chapter 10: Entropic Societies”

Notes

¹ Luís M.A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West, “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities,” PNAS 104(17) (2007): 7301-7306. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0610172104. See also Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (2017).

² Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (2017). Smil’s work is among the most comprehensive treatments of the relationship between energy capture and social complexity.

³ Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). Tainter’s thermodynamic analysis of civilizational collapse remains influential across archaeology, history, and sustainability studies.

⁴ V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review 21 (1950): 3-17. Childe’s ten criteria for urbanism remain foundational in archaeology: greater size and density, full-time specialists, a concentrated surplus, monumental public works, social stratification, writing, the exact sciences, sophisticated art, long-distance trade, and state organization based on residence rather than kinship. The observation about itinerant metalworkers becoming viable only in urban contexts, where customers appear daily rather than seasonally, captures the thermodynamic logic: cities enable specialization by concentrating demand. The same insight applies to Fashion Week and tech clusters: concentration sustains what dispersal cannot.

⁵ Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet (2018). Mann’s dual biography of Norman Borlaug and William Vogt illuminates the deep divide in environmental thought. The “petri dish” framing and Lynn Margulis’s role in articulating the Second Copernican Revolution are drawn from his Long Now Foundation lecture (January 2018). Margulis’s scientific contributions, particularly the theory of endosymbiosis establishing mitochondria’s bacterial origins, earned her the National Academy of Sciences, National Medal of Science (1999). Her mordant view of human exceptionalism reflected her deep immersion in microbial evolution.

⁶ Geoffrey B. West, “The Universal Laws of Growth and Pace,” Long Now Foundation Seminar (2017). West’s analysis of finite time singularities in superlinear growth, the acceleration treadmill, and the mortality asymmetry between cities and companies is developed more fully in Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life (2017). The key finding: companies exhibit sublinear scaling (like organisms, they have diminishing returns and inevitable death) while cities exhibit superlinear scaling (they get more productive per capita as they grow and are nearly immortal). The explanation lies in coordination architecture: cities coordinate through distributed emergence, while companies coordinate through centralized hierarchy. When the environment changes, distributed systems adapt; hierarchical systems shatter.

⁷ Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012). Wilson’s account of two deep human instincts: the intense need to form groups (which develops rapidly even in arbitrary, randomly-assigned teams) and the obsessive evaluation of others (our genius for reading intention, monitoring status, parsing social meaning). These instincts, products of millions of years of group selection in a social species, explain why algorithms optimized for engagement converge on tribal content and social drama. They are exploiting firmware, not creating preference. See also his Long Now Foundation lecture (2012), where he describes these instincts as “so prevalent and so strong and universal that we never or rarely think of them as human traits — we just think of them as being there, like air and water.”

⁸ Hodder, Ian, The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük (2006). Thames & Hudson. Hodder directed the excavation of Çatalhöyük from 1993 onward, documenting its unusual architecture (roof-access dwellings, absence of streets, near-identical housing) and its implications for understanding early social organization before formal hierarchy.

⁹ Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, Before Writing (1992). University of Texas Press. Schmandt-Besserat traced the origins of writing to Sumerian clay tokens used for accounting — small geometric shapes representing quantities of goods. The transition from tokens to impressed marks on clay envelopes to cuneiform script establishes that writing emerged from the need to track economic obligations, predating storytelling or religious use.

¹⁰ Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005). Oxford University Press. Ward-Perkins documents the material collapse following Rome’s fall (the disappearance of mass-produced pottery, the decline of building quality, the contraction of trade networks), arguing against revisionist accounts that minimize the catastrophe. The population of Rome fell from roughly one million at its peak to an estimated 20,000–30,000 by the mid-sixth century.

¹¹ Tajfel, H., et al., “Social categorization and intergroup behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology 1 (1971): 149–178. Tajfel’s “minimal group paradigm” demonstrated that merely dividing people into arbitrary groups (based on trivial criteria like dot-estimation preferences) was sufficient to produce in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination — establishing that group identity and bias require no real conflict of interest to emerge.

¹² Cox, D.A., “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss,” Survey Center on American Life (2021). The survey found that Americans report having fewer close friends than in previous decades, with 12% reporting no close friends at all (up from 3% in 1990) and the share reporting ten or more close friends dropping from 33% to 13% over the same period.

¹³ Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., & Milo, R., “The biomass distribution on Earth,” PNAS 115:25 (2018): 6506-6511. The study estimates total global biomass at approximately 550 Gt C, of which plants account for roughly 450 Gt C (~80%), bacteria ~70 Gt C (~13%), fungi ~12 Gt C (~2%), and all animals only ~2 Gt C (<0.4%). Non-animal life thus constitutes over 99.6% of Earth’s biomass.