Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [85]
Stuart Kauffman has examined the greatest organizing principle in all of biology—evolution—and argues that the large-scale origins and development of life may have come about naturally as a result of what he calls antichaos. Noting that chaos theory explains the randomizing force that causes systems to become disorderly, Kauffman reverses the principle to argue that “there is also a counterintuitive phenomenon that might be called antichaos: some very disordered systems spontaneously ‘crystallize’ into a high degree of order.”24 In the human genome, for example, out of the approximately 100,000 genes that code for the structure and function of a human body and brain, order naturally develops in the construction of approximately one hundred different cell types. Likewise for the evolution of life itself: “Organisms might have certain properties not because of selection but because of the self-organizing properties of those systems on which the selection works.”25 This emergence from chaos to order is described by corollaries 1 and 4 and is a normal function found in many physical, biological, and social phenomena.
What Kauffman calls antichaos, Cohen and Stewart call simplexity, or “the emergence of large-scale simplicities as a direct consequence of rules,” or laws of nature.26 These predictable laws interact with unpredictable contingencies to occasionally trigger the “collapse of chaos.” After the collapse simple rules “emerge from underlying disorder and complexity,” again, as described in corollaries 1 and 4. The antonym of Cohen and Stewart’s simplexity is complicity, “the tendency of interacting systems to coevolve in a manner that changes both, leading to a growth of complexity from simple beginnings—complexity that is unpredictable in detail, but whose general course is comprehensible and foreseeable.”27 Complicity is a restatement of the model of contingent-necessity, especially corollary 3.
Calling their work the first postchaos, postcomplexity analysis, Cohen and Stewart argue that where chaos theory shows that simple causes can produce complex effects, and complexity theory reveals that complex causes can produce simple effects, they demonstrate that simplicity is generated from the interaction of chaos and complexity: “We argue that simplicities of form, function, or behavior emerge from complexities on lower levels because of the action of external constraints”28 this is not unlike a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions, or contingent-necessity.
Mass Hysterias as Chaotic Phenomena
To prove that history also exhibits properties of complexity, antichaos, self-organization, and feedback mechanisms, it will be demonstrated that certain historical phenomena repeat themselves, not in specifics but in universal. The witch crazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries iterate many modern New Age social movements, specifically mass hysterias, moral panics, alien abduction claims, fear of Satanic cults, and the repressed memory movement. The parallels of these social movements to the witch crazes are too close to be accidental. Components of the witch craze movement are still alive in these modern descendants:
1. Women are usually the victims.
2. Sex or sexual abuse is often involved.
3. The mere accusation of potential perpetrators proves their guilt.
4. Denial of guilt is further proof of guilt.
5. Once victimization becomes well known in a community, others suddenly appear with similar claims.
6. The movement hits a critical peak of accusation where almost