Human Systems

The challenge of human systems theory is that there are few if any real mathematically elegant formulae to describe universal principles governing either individual human behavior or the behavior of entire social systems--both are incredibly complex phenomena composed of many different interacting variables. Attempts to mathematize such theory come out largely sterile, empty abstractions totally incapable of any true predictions of historical events. Human behavior is ultimately arbitrary and independent of many constraining factors. Similarly so with social behavior, which is really the interaction of multiple human agencies, but here the uncertainties of outcomes and frequencies of accidents increases. The question we must try to answer is how can a system that is fundamentally arbitrary in nature be described in a cause-effect framework, as something that is the outcome of other factors and constraining variables. Ardent social scientists would of course claim that human behavior is never completely arbitrary, and even apparently arbitrary behavior is usually the product of other influences affecting the outcomes, etc. But such arguments go only so far--they push the essential problem of the fundamental arbitrariness of human nature, of human willpower, of human choice between alternatives, to the background, where it can be conveniently ignored or implicitly dismissed.

The same problem of general description occurs in the biological sciences, to a lesser extent, and especially among those fields of biology that deal with macroscopic and macrobiotic systems. Lacking the mathematical elegance that much of modern physics and the physical sciences have obtained, the biological and especially the human sciences are seen therefore as less rigorous, less systematic, and less successful as a science, so much so that many would deny the status of science to the fields of inquiry into human social behavior, and others would rather assert the preeminence of the humanities in the discovery of truth in human nature, etc. It is not surprising therefore that theories abound in all the sciences when the known gives way at the horizon of the unknown and the twilight of uncertainty, and especially in fields like the social sciences where there appears to be no end, and no real beginning, to the adventures of theorization. It is not surprising either that paradigmatic closure is not really possible in the social sciences (and in fact in not any form of science unless the sense of closure is in fact ideological and not scientific closure on a problem set). Generalization is too weak, even in its broadest, most qualitative formalization, and the problem sets and field of data described far too large and complex to be readily accommodated within any single paradigmatic system of thought.

It seems therefore that we must either abandon the social and psychological sciences as something not or less than genuinely scientific, or perhaps alternately we must adopt a broader, and perhaps more encompassing and realistic view of what science really is.

A broader science permits a range of generalization based on a wider field of observation, and upon the ability to assess qualitative statements as relative true or not true, and not just upon quantitative measurement. If we look closely enough, we will find similar forms of qualitative generalization obtaining in the physical sciences as well as in the biological and anthropological realm, and for good reason. When the strength of our measurement yields to the vast quantity and complexity of scale of the world it seeks to understand, the former kind of analytically bound science must yield.

If we replace therefore our preconceptions of an analytic, quantitatively based science with a new form of generalization based upon the holistic observation of systems, of part-whole processes, and relationship, then we see room for an expanded definition of what is science. To see the world as a kind of system, in systematic terms, at whatever levels we may observe its occurrence, is to step beyond the boundaries of a normal kind of science that is preoccupied with the parts rather than with the whole.

The quest for comprehensiveness occurs in all fields of science, and is a logical extension of the process of theoretical generalization of first and ultimate principles. The quest for comprehensiveness, and comprehension, drives generalization in the sciences, as well it should, though it often does not necessarily drive much methodological operationalization and experimentation in various scientific specializations. Problem solving in the sciences is focused on detail and local problem sets, rather than on the universal and the global.

If we venture to assume a great dichotomy in scientific theorization, we can distinguish between a worldview that sees all of reality as a kind of clockwork, a time-piece, that functions with specific mechanisms and movements in predictable, time-ordered fashion. The alternative viewpoint is what can only be called the organismic or developmental perspective. In this viewpoint, the universe, and its many parts and layers, is not so much a perfect mechanism that keeps time in a reiterative fashion, so much as it is a set of events and dynamic processes with rather uncertain and ultimately unpredictable outcomes. Patterns emerge, grow, unfold and change variably in time. When we look at the world, we must ask which perspective is the correct one to adopt, especially for a revised science that claims both breadth and depth of scope and capacity. In truth we see both perspectives necessary for a complete view of reality, and either one alone inadequate and insufficient for such a comprehensive perspective. For there are dimensions and aspects of the patterning of nature that is very much like clockwork, and there are other patterns and events that are very much dynamical and unpredictable in outcome. Nature is as if these two sets of patterns were amalgamated, married, bastardized between them, with hardly ever a clear sense of where one kind of pattern leaves off and the other takes over.

Human reality is socially constructed. This is a scientific paradigm for the understanding of human behavior, social patterning and human psychological processes in an integrated manner. To claim that human reality is socially constructed is not to diminish the seriousness of the games that we play, that we must play, in order to survive and succeed upon the human stage of the world. Lives are made and broken in this game, and the consequences of success and failure are as real and unconstructed as it gets, regardless of the manner that the game is played. Being constructed merely implies a certain fundamental arbitrariness about our behavior and sense of reality that suggests that, no matter how bad things may become, we have some measure of choice and therefore certain degrees of freedom, if not in the final and often unintended consequences, then at least in terms of our response patterning to events that occur in our lives. The constructed nature of reality provides us at least with the possibility, no matter how remote the likelihood, of a conterfactual or the realization of a hypothetical reality.

The basis for the paradigm of the social construction of reality stems from the observation that human behavior is almost entirely mediated by our relatively large and sophisticated brains that are capable, indeed that have little other choice, than to articulate in reality in a symbolic manner. This symbolic capacity has arisen as a complex of our unique evolutionary development and our natural historical situation. Among other things the symbolic structure of human reality underlies the structure of all our knowledge, our perception, our cognition and our behavioral response patterning in reality. Very little has been left over for the role of human instinct and human reflex. Thus the constructed dimensionality of human reality, both in a shared and in a private, psychological sense, is a result and reflection of the structure of our symbolic modus operandi. We depend upon symbolic operations of our intelligence to mediate our worlds in an adaptive and successful manner, and indeed we cannot really escape the constraining influence of these symbolic operations in our daily lives.

It entails, among other things, that we are by our nature social animals, and a part of this social nature is that we are not only the bearers of human culture, but the producers and reproducers of our cultural adaptations that extend out into the world and influence our environments in a metabiotic and historical sense. The perspective of human systems comes into play when we begin to realize in some objectified sense that the patterning of all human behavior, at any level that it is discernible, is structured in certain meaningful and expectable if not quite predictable ways. The systematic structure of human patterning, symbolic in nature, allows us a scientific handle or rather yet, a mirror, for seeing, reflecting upon and objectifying aspects about our own reality, of ourselves in reality as if we are something or someone else, that would otherwise remain invisible and out of our own awareness. It also allows us the framwork for developing conceptual systems, models and experiments that represent and reflect our own human nature in a manner that is true to our form and character.

If we did not treat human reality as a construction, no matter how tragic or comical its consequences, then we would be ultimately unable to separate ourselves from our own illusions that are the product of our constructions. We could not objectify our experiences in a disembodied manner, and we would therefore be unable to obtain a scientific comprehension of the patterning and structure underlying our common nature and our behavior.

The foundation of method and theory in human systems science, or meta-science, is in the articulation of the methodology of symbolic framing in relation to the framework of the anthropological construction of reality. In its most straight-forward terms, symbolic framing consists of a large variety of "framing" tasks that provide under experimental and controlled conditions the necessary context and stimuli for the elicitation of different kinds of behavioral response patternings of informants and participants. Tasks as these were originally employed in symbolic framing included inkblot tasks (Harrower, Rorscharch); thematic apperception tasks (SAT, CAT); sentence completion and sentence frame tasks; perception tasks; various inventories; dichotomous tasks; grids; color tasks; rank-order tasks; drawing tasks; pattern recognition tasks; memory tasks, etc. These tasks all share a similar framework of interpretation and deployment in field settings in a manner divested of psychoanalytic or deeper psychic interpretation or in terms of inferable personality characteristics, and were treated rather in both nomothetic and idiographic designs to elicit common patterns of response among different sets of informants that were grouped along various distinguishing factors (sex, age, socioeconomic background, similar life-experiences, cultural background, etc.)

Critical to symbolic framing is the mapping of subjective experience upon the external environment, or the transference of subjective content upon symbolic stimuli the locus of which exists in the external world. With human beings, this process is an automatic and built-in one. We cannot avoid our sense of symbolic attachment to the world, for it is not only how we relate to the world, but it forms the foundation for even how we perceive and think about the world and remember it afterwards. This process can be called one of symbolic experience and forms the basis for the anthropological relativity of human reality, of all knowledge of reality and our most basic experiences in the world. At the same time that we are projecting symbolic content upon the world, we are internalizing the sense of order and symbolic topography of our experience, incorporating and embodying this experience in a manner that allows us to maintain a sense of psychological and behavioral coherence about the world within the framework of certain personality and character configurations that have been developed within us. These configurations are reinforced and modeled to a great extent by cultural models and mappings of experience, especially as these are inter-subjectively reinforced by significant others and by reference groups with which we have some sense of identification or affiliation. What is achieved with these complex symbolic processes is an overarching sense of symbolic integration of experience that can be said to be as inclusive as possible, and that involves the coordination and congruence of internalized symbolisms with externalized constructions.

Symbolic framing provides a methodological and empirical bridge between the cognitive sciences that are preoccupied with the mental functioning of the human brain, and a plethora of symbolic theories and frameworks that are primarily concerned with the articulation of human symbolization in the larger world. It rests upon a testable definition of cultural pattern as being significant shared correlational configurations of response to a wide range of symbolic framing tasks within a variety of experimental settings, and this in turn provides a foundation for a systematic means of comparative, cross-cultural research.

Symbolic framing methodology proved successful in establishing significant non-random patterns of difference and sharing between groupings and sub-groupings of people, patterns that were consistent and even predictable between different kinds of tasks. These patterns became especially apparent with the application of computer-based inter-correlational and cluster analysis, and demonstrated the existence of underlying complexes of structural relations that guided symbolic behavioral response.

They were broadly interpreted within a general Gestalt framework concerning the perception and articulation of part-whole and figure-ground relationships, and what can be called the perceptual-cognitive-behavioral continuity of human experience The implication is that cultural reality is symbolically situated in the mind of the informant, and behaviorally articulated in terms that are socially identifiable. According to this methodology, culture is defined in an operative manner as a set of shared patterns, however complex and inexplicable in a deterministic manner.

Efforts in China were 1. To systematically extend these methods to a new and historically unconnected sample population; 2. To extend the methods to embrace linguistic, and especially, oral-based patterns of response among informants; 3. To apply such methods in a systematic manner to issues of acquisition, human development and education in trying to devise and test alternative teaching and instructional methodologies that might improve rates of learning and retention.

Projective tasks are important to the implementation of symbolic framing methods because they provide part-whole stimuli the ambiguity of which can be systematically controlled, and because they provide a direct demonstration of a symbolic theory of human cognition that serves to bridge the gap between knowledge of cognitive functioning of the brain on one hand, and knowledge of symbolic articulation and communication in social life, on the other hand. Recent criticism and abandonment of many previous projective tasks has been in my opinion unwarranted and has led to a loss of almost a century of productive research in these areas. New methodologies based almost exclusive upon inventories fail to take the complexity of symbolic-cognitive stratification and cultural bias into account, and in general fail to deal adequately with the problems of using literate and linguistic based methodologies. This retrenchment of American psychology, which is seen as both a response to a political-economic structuration that has lead to a conservative closure of the psychological mind and methodologies, and to a reaction to the stark and unproductive behaviorism and empirical academic psychology of previous decades. It was the interpretive, largely psychoanalytic framework in which these projective tasks were conventionally employed that was suspect, and not the reliability and efficacy of the tasks themselves.

Efforts on my own part of late, less systematic and thorough but more applicable to meeting various educational standards, needs and goals, have been to the revitalization of these methods in relation to the development of teaching and instructional techniques and strategies that is based upon a theory that learning is achieved through patterning recognition and meaningful symbolic relation between the object-stimuli and the pattern of response. Success of methods employed in China provide substantive evidence for the conclusion that learning can indeed be accelerated and promoted in the right conditions, and it depends upon students bringing to realization and overcoming internal repression and unconscious patterns of symbolic organization of experience that may interfere with the acquisition and adaptation of new information and adoption of new patterns of behavioral response. Learning requires a kind of symbolic openness and "in-tuneness" both to the external environment as well as to the internal machinations of the psyche. This latter phenomenon appears most often as a delicate tight-rope or balancing act, and it is not uncommon with exaggerated behavioral or mental disorders that one becomes hyper-developed at the expense of the other.

Of course, the science of human systems theory extends beyond a symbolic framing methodology, as it must both in theory and operationally, to consider human social systems as transpersonal and corporate institutional phenomena. In this case, individual symbolic functioning is seen to functionally reinforce and to more or less mediate the interpersonal relationships and transactions that occur at different levels and in different behavioral settings in society. We may extend the hypothesis embedded in symbolic framing methodology systematically in a number of different directions to explain more fully human language and related linguistic phenomena, human communication and cybernetic systems, human social patterning and patterns of institutional structuration, human cultural and cross-cultural and intercultural exchange processes, as well as patterns of natural development of human systems upon various levels of articulation of these systems.

One critical issue in consideration of human systems theory can be said to be the symbolic mediation of human stress and response under conditions of extreme or prolonged socio-environmental circumscription or crowding, or alternative under conditions identified by Robert Jay Lifton as "desymbolization" or the symbolic deculturation of a social framework. Anthropology has tended to shy away from the study of patterns of human violence and authoritarianism, as replete and all pervasive as these patterns have been, which has followed a tendency towards the romanticization of the other as a symbolic projection of the unconscious psyche of the self.

The entire notion and validity of symbolic framing methodology rests upon a revised and refined understanding of the anthropological relativity of human experience and knowledge, filtered as this is always through a symbolic strainer that for most intents and purposes remains transparent to our own consciousness. It is necessary that the human mind presents to itself experience as consistent, non-contradictory and in a coherent way that has no interruptions, ambiguities, gaps in our experiential fields, or unexpected consequences. This process of smoothing over the bumps of our experience is equivalent to watching a film without seeing the frame-by-frame flicker on the screen. We notice this only when the film jumps off its track in the projector, which would be equivalent to some forms of mental illness and perceptual-behavioral incompetency. The mind smoothes over perceptual experience even upon a very basic level--we never see the blind-spot in our perceptual field, or notice its presence. Traumatic events can be temporarily or permanently repressed from consciousness in a similar attempt to maintain the symbolic integrity of experience and to block out "noise" or other contradictory signals that would possibly result in destructive interference.

The human mind requires some sensible form of externalized field of stimuli by which to frame and test its sense of experience--otherwise, like a child blind and deaf who is cut completely off from the world, the mind cannot achieve the integration that it requires to function in even a minimally normal manner. That the externalized field should be a culturally contextualized one, carpentered and constructed by people in consistent social interaction, seems to be important as well, and this leads to the first hypothesis of the anthropological construction of reality, namely that human beings have evolved to become symbolic creatures who are entirely dependent upon cultural forms and frameworks for the integration and organization of their experience. We cannot fully comprehend or explain human nature or human behavior outside of the contexts that culture provides for the framing of human experience and the elicitation of human response.

The second hypothesis of cultural dependency has two corollaries--a.) the corollary of the symbolic dependency of the human psyche upon externally framed constructions, and b.) the corollary of the social dependency of the human personality upon socially defined and sanctioned institutions to guide and channel the expression of appropriate behavior.

A second hypothesis regarding human nature follows from this first, and it is the claim that human beings were originally predatory (type 3, selective predation) animals and are fundamentally competitive in their social relationships, as well as in all their environmental relations. This competitive nature of human beings is a function of basic drives rooted in biology for adaptive survival and reproductive success. A corollary of this hypothesis is that human beings, being socially and culturally dependent creatures, primarily define competition in socially defined ways, and most often form cooperative social institutional frameworks for the control and channeling of competitive behavior. Cooperative institutional frameworks constrain free and open human behavior by defining role-explicit and role-appropriate constraints and sanctions for appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

A third hypothesis relates the first two together, and regards what can be called the symbolic transformation of basic human drives and experiences into forms that are indirectly related or displaced from their original evolutionary frameworks. The symbolic transformation of human experience enunciates the anthropological relativity of human knowledge and behavior, and entails that people act "out" in forms of symbolic displacement, projection and repression, these fundamental feelings, drives, impulses, insecurities, anxieties, that are deeply rooted in the basic biological foundation of human nature. We can say that symbolic transformation of human experience is necessary, and is usually attended to systematically through years of primary and secondary development of personality involving socialization and education.

A fourth hypothesis is based upon this third, and derivative of it, and it is the hypothesis of the anthropological construction of reality that seeks through cultural frameworks to achieve a degree of symbolic closure and integration of experience, which it can never completely achieve, because in an evolutionary sense human beings in terms of their human nature are unfinished business. The anthropological construction of human reality has both psychological and social components and manifestations, as previously alluded to in reference to symbolic framing methodologies. Our world-openness which has freed us evolutionarily from the chains of natural bondage has also rendered them helpless and naked in the face of nature without the mediation and intervention of cultural devises and frameworks that serve to achieve the sense of closure and integration not otherwise allowed. Religion can be seen in this manner, especially when it comes to an understanding and coping with fundamental issues like death and marginal episodes that serve to create human suffering.

The fifth and final hypothesis of this theory of human systems is again derived from the previous hypothesis of the anthropological construction of reality, and it involves the concept of the continuous function of cultural and symbolic mediation and interpretation of experience to effect the integration of reality that is otherwise non-existent. Behaviorally and socially, this process is vital in serving to transact human relationships and interactions, and to channel and repress natural tendencies towards aggression and violence. In this model, violence that is the result of arbitrary human behavior is an unfortunate consequence of the symbolic transformation and mediation of experience that has become anti-social in character.

Human beings, anthropologically and scientifically speaking, are neither good nor bad. They are complex creatures who are the by-product of a long and complex evolutionary history. We have clearly a proclivity and predisposition to aggression, which aggression is a sign of our innate biological drives, and which frequently leads to violent and anti-social behavior. We have a related tendency towards authoritarian compulsion and character, which can become socially articulated in institutional frameworks--this latter tendency is a function of our symbolic and culturally dependent natures. We are quite capable of both very creative and very destructive acts, and there has been no creature on earth who has murdered so shamelessly for no other reason than the perversity of the act. It has not been very difficult in the course of human history to mobilize entire populations for the purpose of commitment mass genocide or ethnocide upon another group of people. From a culturally relative point of view, symbolic systems would reinforce rationalization that served to legitimize such behavior in a seemingly non-contradictory manner.

The object of alternative design in human systems is the construction of alternative institutional frameworks that will accomplish several things at once--the maximization of human developmental potential on the one hand, and the minimization of the risks and expressions of human aggression and violence in counterproductive ways. The role of government becomes to effectively implant controls and sanctions over human behavior that serves to constrain and limit such behavior in directions that are constructive rather than destructive. The responsibility of any form of human government becomes in theory and ethically to keep people as responsible as possible, including especially people who have governmental authority and power, and balancing this with assuring the greatest latitude of freedom possible to all human beings.

We cannot say psychologically that all human beings want to necessarily be or to do good, even in a fundamental or misplaced manner. Neither can we say that all humans are naturally violent. Violence is learned just about as much as goodness must be learned. Human beings can be said to be naturally aggressive, more or less, and this aggressiveness is defined fundamentally as the expression of innate drives towards biological survival and achievement of reproductive success. The latter form of drive lends some credence to a Freudian psycho-sexual framework of the human psyche, although I do believe that sublimation and compensation of the sexual drive into other channels of expression is normally achieved through symbolic transformation of experience, and also that aggressive drives associated with basic needs and biological survival instincts are easily coupled, and just as easily dissociated, from fundamental sexual based libidinal drives. The world openness and transformability of human beings through symbolic conditioning demonstrates a tremendous phenotypical plasticity of the human personality, manifest in human behavior, that tends to gain its greatest expression through socially sanctioned institutions. We can say that psychologically all humans have some sense of choice, whatever their cognitive condition or social circumstances, and that humans must act in some manner that serves to fulfill their basic drives. People are quite capable of rationalization of their experience and behavior to suit their own profiles of needs and drives, but they are not judged by their words rather than by their deeds or even possibly a failure to act when a choice to act was upon them. What we can say psychologically is that all people, even those afflicted with mental illness, strive to make sense of their world in a manner that allows a coordination and integration of both internal symbolizations and external constructs of their environment. Whether they achieve success or not with this is a function of their adaptive conditioning and behavioral niche they come to carve out for themselves in the world. A sign of mental illness, of whatever kind, is an inherent narcissism of personality that precludes the possibility of non-spurious social relationships and that is to be seen as being psychologically and developmentally regressive for the personality. The complexity of the human brain and personality demonstrates that people can show such signs in some areas of their life and activity, and not in other areas. In this case, I would say, the complete process of symbolic transference and transformation of experience is somehow blocked or interfered with, and such people have difficulty with social relations not only for a general lack of responsibility or a proclivity towards inappropriate behavior, but because, especially in human social relationships, they are unable to achieve the degree of symbolic internalization/externalization of relationship and integration that is normally attained. Such individuals would lack a genuine sense of empathy or consideration for the condition, well being or suffering of others in the world.

The basis for understanding symbolic framing methodology is in terms of the functional partitioning of the human brain, which is unique in the animal kingdom, and as a consequences its capacity for memory, learning, complex pattern recognition, planning and ratiocination, creative productivity and for symbolic understanding of reality that is mediated linguistically.

Emblematic pattern recognition that is characteristic of the cognition of very young infants is based upon a very rapid rate at which neuronal connections are being formed in the young brain, and how these connections form between different locii of brain tissue that are functionally interconnected by nerve pathways. If the brain is a neural network, it is a remarkably adaptable network. Perceptual and cognitive constancy of pattern affects our understanding and comprehension of new experience. The rate of learning, of laying down new neural pathways for adults is much less than that for young infants, but the measure and complexity of understanding and integration of experience is much greater for adults than for children.

The brain provides what can be called a phenomenological continuity of human experience that is based upon its symbolic organization. The brain functions at all times to maintain a symbolic unity and integration of conscious reality. It acts to smooth over holes and rough spots at multiple levels, and to present reality as if always harmoniously integrated. This integrity of experience is socially mediated, primarily through the oral function of language. Human linguistic capacity is the foundation of the symbolic organization of human consciousness, and makes possible the degree of conceptual abstraction of which human cognition is capable. The basis of this is what I would refer to as the process of symbolic displacement and transference of deposited cognitive patterns onto external stimuli or patterns that were not the original source of the patterns. This is the symbolic framing of experience, and the management and processing of incoming information, always chaotic, in a manner that is chunked into meaningful units and organized into meaningful assemblies or gestalts. We can say that this process of organization is linguistically mediated. The sharing of experience, information, and response patterning between people becomes very important.

It is evident that contradictory external stimuli can lead to a short-circuiting of internal functional pattern, and can result in the effective blocking or shutting off of the normal symbolic framing experience. A marked field dependency develops in which the input-output loop becomes foreshortened. Alternatively, there can occur internal dissociation of functional pattern, driven by deep and primitive impulses, that can override the adaptive and external mediational framework. Either way, the result is a kind of noetic disequilibrium between the brain and its symbolic-behavioral context.

Human systems cohere upon multiple levels naturally. In this they are like other complex mammalian systems that also stratify upon several levels of patterning simultaneously. Unlike other similar biological systems, human systems are uniquely characterized by the quality and complexity of the pattern of integration that is achieved upon these different levels, and when we investigate patterns of human ecology and relationship within a metabiotic context, we discover that this ecology is also unique and unlike that of any other form of life on earth in terms of its complexity and sophistication of pattern. In particular we must attribute these unique patterns to certain properties of the large human brain and its consequences for behavior and for the life-trajectory of human beings. In particular we may specify the capacity of the human brain for human language and for symbolic pattern recognition and symbol manipulation. This patterning is also tied to prolonged post-partum infant dependency on a prolonged and delayed period of developmental acquisition that is achieved through learning and transmission of environmentally based patterns. Human beings have become evolutionarily dependent upon these post-partum patterns of postponed cognitive-morphological development to acquire the information and skills necessary for successful adaptation in complex contexts in the natural world. The result has been a form of symbolic-cultural dependency upon externally created systems of organization of information and behavior that are posited in the social body and pattern of social organization.

Thus we may find human systems being articulated on the level of the individual human being, the small biologically reproductive family grouping, and upon larger community and inter-community levels of organization and interaction. Each of these levels has a symbolic-cultural overlay with resonances upon the other levels, and we may say that human systems cohere upon these multiple levels to foster a sense of a human metasystem, or supersystem. If an individual human system is uniquely complex and its own system, it is also an inherently underdetermined system, as it is upon the other levels as well. As such, any individual human system is partially dependent upon involvement at the other levels in a larger framework of a metasystem. Such involvement entails that the individal human being cannot be a completely self-determining creature, but remains largely a product and a consequence of interacting factors embedded in larger situational circumstances, contexts normally defined in relation to a larger sense of social order.

It is the complex dependent and undetermined nature of human systems in general that have made the social, psychological, behavioral and anthropological sciences of these patterns so problematic and difficult. Comprehensive theory of such systems that is satisfactory for all interests and involvements in these areas of inquiry seems either impossible to achieve or else so remote a possibility that its likelihood remains very low.

Many in the field argue against the possibility of a genuine science of humankind that extends beyond a biological framework to embrace a cultural and social perspective.

A comprehensive framework of understanding human systems in general can only be achieved through the objectification of such systems, as cultural and symbolic based realities that are the product of natural patterning and integration involving the complexities of the human brain and other related and uniquely human capacities like language, hand-eye manipulation skills, symbolic cognition and human social patterning that also, in its total arrangement, seems unique on earth.

It is assumed that, because humans are all of a single species, a species that may have essentially evolved in just the past one hundred thousand years or so, the anthropological structure of this species remains in its basic substrate the same, or universal, for all intents and purposes, and in spite of a substantial amount of variability between populations and different individuals. It is clear that variability of patterning in the human species also coheres at multiple levels, individually and socially, and this variability is important to an understanding of the factors that influence human design. Thus, while we may produce generalizations about this patterning that upon some level or another hold true for all human beings, these generalizations are never complete or of the form that we find in the physical or even biological sciences, and they disguise generally a great range of natural variation that exists within the human population for any particular trait or trait complex.

This points up the first shared characteristic of the human species, upon a biological level, and that is the evidence for the tremendous genetic load that we carry as is evidenced by this pattern of variability. This load becomes expressed on both the individual and populational levels of variation, but it is especially apparent populationally when we take into account broad distributions of groups and subgroupings over large bio-geophysical regions. This load may well have been a consequence of the adaptive success of the human species in its ability to fan out to and occupy a vast range of different habitats in a variety of ecological frameworks, as well as its ability to perennially maintain surplus populations in a reproductive capacity that would be otherwise impossible or unlikely if selection regimes and circumstances were more restrictive and tolerance limits narrower. All of this can be accounted for as the consequence of the cultural intervention, or process of cultural selection, operating in lieu of natural selection upon the human species. It may also have been the consequence of the the broad geographical distribution of the human species, especially in the last 70 thousand years, but even for the previous two million years, which may have resulted in broad patterns of genetic diffusion and rediffusion of traits leading to in increase in the overall heterogeneity of populations. The fact that the human species has remained reproductively viable on a species level in spite of a broad distribution and a great deal of inherent variability of pattern indicates that though many early human populations may have been relatively isolated from one another, few if any were or could afford to have been in complete isolation. Upon a regional level of increasing scope, local populations readily interacted and exchanged genetic traits as a result of such intercourse. Such variability that built up would result in increasing heterogeneity for the human population as a whole as well as an inherent stability of the overall population profile regardless of such a heavy load.

It is possible that this load is indicated by the relatively large number of genetic syndromes that recur in the human population, and in different populations, that have built up and resisted negative selection.

It is important to understand the larger and most basic evolutionary role that this genetic load may have played in the unique conditioning of the human species. This load was based upon a broad range adaptive generalization and successive radiations the consequence of which would have been a distinctive form and general direction of evolutionary development for humankind. It is possible that the unique patterns of human sexuality may be related to this issue of the maximization of genetic variability of the species. We may say that human beings have evolved as a rather sexually gregarious, if not completely promiscuous species, and this inherent orientation of human sexuality required subsequent institutional development of social mechanisms of control to limit and constrain populations especially in contexts where socio-environmental circumscription from local overpopulation developed. Sexual gregariousness assured the relatively open and unhindered transmission of genetic traits across a wide range gene pool.

The maximization of a generalizing strategy of adaptation may have been, throughout most of human evolutionary history, the default and predominant preference in selection patterns, which tendency would have resulted in and in turn benefited from the heterogenization and increase in genetic load of the human species.

It can be said that human populations increasingly benefited from carrying excess genetic load, as I have defined this, in spite of the risk of carrying potentially deleterious genetic traits forward. Increasing genetic load is related to increased adaptive/reproductive generalizability of the species. Maximization of the heterogeneity of the human population entailed that very wide parameters of environmental limitations could be set down upon this population. It is in this evolutionary context of favorable increase in genetic variability and load that we can find the causes and consequences of the expansion of human cranial capacity and its general specialization of the brain towards language and productive/reproductive behavior.

The human species through increased intelligence and development of a material culture gained a handle of cultural control over basic adaptive problems in natural selection. This led to a shift of emphasis from inter-specific relations increasingly towards intra-specific relations and preoccupations, and to a preoccupation with reproductive success, versus generalized adaptive success. Out-migration is a typical strategy for peripheral members or groups that fail to compete endogenously within a group context. Humans were well equipped for successful out-migration, and seem to have been selected by this method towards larger brains. A migrating group or disparate set of individuals would have to put a premium upon generalized adaptability to a broader range of possible resources and ecological relations. Such patterns of out-migration tended to select certain general types, and also encouraged the forms of gene transmission between groups that resulted in the amalgamation of the human species over space and time.

At the same time, it is possible that infant mortality rates during most of the period of human evolutionary emergence may have been quite high--in excess of 50 percent or more due to a variety of causes such as disease, malnutrition, neglect, accidental or intentional trauma, and abuse. Infant mortality rates as high as 30% are estimated for most human populations during the historical epoch previous to the industrial era and the age of modern medicine, and I would suspect that these rates were even higher during and earlier evolutionary epoch. Such high rates of infant mortality must be seen in connection to the long periods of post-partum neo-natal and infantile dependency that would put both the child and the mother at some risk in contexts where their minimal requirements for survival could not be easily or straightforwardly met. I suspect that a mother or couple could afford to lose a child, being capable of easily replacing the child with a new one within a year or less. A high rate of infant mortality would almost certainly be correlated with a high rate of birth for mothers, and a maximization of the reproductive role of the female within such a context. A premium would be thus set pon a females reproductive capacity and the maximization of this capacity during a woman's life cycle. This dilemma is a paradox when we consider that human populations probably tended towards their saturation levels for most of human history. If human populations found an ecological vacuum, then within just a few generations they could quickly fill this vacuum with descendants. In such circumstances, social investment in the welfare of the individual would be a function of longevity and age would be a principal factor of social stratification within such a system. Early human populations rapidly increased to their carrying capacity as a consequence of their high rates of birth, stimulated by high rates of infant mortality. It would have required an average of 100 births to produce fifty or less viable adult offspring capable of carrying the genetic load, and of these fifty, the gene pool would have been split almost in half between male and female. If these twenty-five couples were reassorted, and had 10 births each on average, with a similar 50% birth rate, then at the end of a cycle 125 viable offspring would be produced, which would lead to a reassortment of 62.5 males and a similar number of females, or more than twice the previous generation. The generation cycle would be shortened as well, with an estimated time of less than twenty five years--possibly as few as 15 years. In a sense such a system would exhibit a self-maintaining equilibrium of exponential increase coupled to a cycle of periodic expansion-niche diversification and out-migration, as well as to a larger system of mate-exchange and genetic transmission. The basis for a primitive form of regional or inter-community social organization would be established. A group of ten individuals, five males and five females, could potentially migrate to a new region and within a century reach the carrying capacity for the region with fourth or fifth generation offspring, some of whom would then be faced with the choice of having to seek greener pastures, and hence new social relations beyond the area. This pattern is to be considered especially applicable to an understanding of early human ecology if we also understand that this adaptive success was largely mediated through human-made technology and increasing knowledge that permitted humans a broader base of eco-trophic niche adaptation than would have been otherwise possible, and hence capable of sustaining in a stable manner a much higher carrying capacity than would have been otherwise possible under natural (i.e., non-cultural circumstances.)

Under the framework of a perennially heavy genetic load, there would be a premium placed on out-mating to larger systems, as I suspect that if inbreeding occurred at a high rate, then deleterious traits would quickly show up in such a loaded system resulting in rapid decline of viable offspring.

Within such a framework genetic load and inheritance of deleterious or less than optimal traits could be tolerated up to some point, as the high likelihood of early death would have obviated the consequences of this load anyway, and the benefit of maintaining an open gene pool would have outweighed its potential costs.

Efficiency in ecological and evolutionary frameworks are relative to the system and the surroundings being described. A mechanical definition of efficiency is a relatively high ratio of output to input in a working system. An maximally efficient system accomplishes a set of effects (an end state) with the minimum of waste or effort. We can contrapose efficiency of a working system to the complementary state of entropy we can assign to a system, which for a closed thermodynamic system becomes the measure of the amount of total energy unavailable for work, or the relative measure of disorder or randomness in a system (in any given state). All naturally occurring systems, including human systems, must obey the laws of thermodynamics, which means that we can have no perfectly efficient or perfectly non-entropic system.

Work is defined as the informational (nonrandom) organization of energy to achieve some desired effect or product or to maintain some systemic state of order within a given amount of time. Work in its most fundamental sense can be defined as the systematic transfer of energy from one form or state to another, or state transformation. Work induces a kind of change therefore, and results a form of change. This form of change is the opposite of natural entropic tendencies towards increasing randomization. I will therefore call "positive change" any state transformation that results in an increasingly non-entropic state, and a negative change as any state transformation resulting in an increasingly entropic state.

All systems are changing either towards increasing order or increasing disorder.

All other things being equal, all systems will tend towards increasing disorder if no work is done to increase order.

Since work is always be definition imperfect, and because all systems tend in the long run toawards increasing disorder, all working systems must eventually become dysfunctional as systems.

Naturally occuring systems can therefore be called informationally stochastic or "self-organizing" systems because there occurs no well-defined, external causal agency that determines the organizational structure of the patterning of a system.

An organized system is one that is intelligently ordered, or "informationally coherent," to perform some minimal form of work. Intelligent ordering of any system is a measure of that system's integration and relative state complexity.

1. All systems are part of a larger, more entropic environment that constitute the surroundings of a system.

3. All systems are composed of multiple components and thus are multi-factorially determined.

4. The determination of any system, according to the laws of thermodynamics and of informational dynamics, is always incomplete--systems are thus complexly underdetermined.

5. Systems are therefore subject to continuous state change that is both exogenous and exogenous.

6. The complex underdetermination of partially open thermodynamic systems entails that all such systems can perform only a limited amount of work for a given duration of time.

7. Eventually, all naturally occurring systems must disintegrate and cease to function (to do work) as informationally coherent systems.

It is important to distinguish between total entropy of a complex system and the net entropy of such a system.

1. Naturally occurring systems are self-organizational working systems that achieve some sense of complex equilibrium within its environment.

2. Equilibrium is an entropy dependent and temporally dependent relationship of a system, such that the higher the equilibrium of a system, the lower its total entropy, and the longer lasting the system will be.

3. This equilibrium can be understood in terms of the ratio of net efficiency of the ratio of energy input into a system (E_I) over the energy output from the system (E_O) plus the energy lost from the system, or the instantaneous disorder of the system (S) equals 1.

4. All natural systems will tend towards some optimum value of equilibrium that will be a function of the time and size of the system. Equilibrium of a system is a time dependent function, such that a system will increase in order towards equilibrium, achieve a stable state-path trajectory, and eventually then decrease in order back towards total disequilibrium.

5. The measure of the efficiency of a system is positively correlated with the measure of the integration and informational value of a system.

6. A totally disordered system is a one that exists at the lowest potential energy state and has the least amount of informational value, whereas a hypothetically and totally ordered system is one that exists at the highest potential energy shate and that has the greatest amont of informational value.

I will venture a basic set of propositions about biological systems in general and their eco-evolutionary tendencies:

1. Natural biological systems tend to evolve towards higher energy utilization or a higher energy budget but at a cost of greater entropy to the system.

The processes underlying the original and historical development of human systems

The processes underlying the organizational patterning and integration of human systems.

The processes underlying the transformation of human systems from one state into another.

Because human beings are mammals and are social, they represent animal populations. Human populations are therefore subject to the same basic biological imperatives that all biological systems are subject to. These imperatives, defined within an eco-evolutionary framework, are the challenges of adaptive survival and reproductive success. These become expressed in animal populations primarily in terms of three primary biological goals:

Because within a natural eco-evolutionary framework, no trait-development will be tolerated or successful in the long-term unless it promotes evolutionary success, the rise of human trait-complexes relating to and underlying human cultural systems can only be understood within an eco-evolutionary framework.

All natural systems are governed by basic thermodynamic rules and all biological ecosystems can be understood in terms the energy exchange dynamics that occur in such systems. Early eco-systems models were based upon energy exchange dynamics of foodwebs within ecosystems.

Reliance upon plants is an inherently more energy efficient strategy than reliance on other animals, and leads to greater biomass.

Larger biomass systems are determined either by greater population densities and/or greater body size per individual.

The rise of human cultural systems can be fit squarely into this eco-evolutionary framework. Human systems, as natural systems, will increase in order, scale and complexity as the result of increased working efficiency by which it achieves these basic biological imperatives. This is definable as the use of information (or know-how or "basic science") to improve the efficiency and likelihood of success in all three areas of adaptation.

It follows that the rise of human civilization and the evolutionary development of cultural systems can be understood clearly in terms of the degree to which these goals have been achieved with increasing efficiency through the use of knowledge.

1. early humans relied primarily upon high-energy cost/low efficiency patterns of Type III response and numerical response predation and attack-abatement/defense by which to accomplish biological goals 1 & 2. Predation strategies represented always mixed animal-plant dependent eco-trophic niche profiles that entailed a great deal of local and regional variability of patterning. Hunting and gathering strategies that were primarily opportunistic modes of adaptation that entailed active pursuit and defense and put humans at the top of the eco-trophic niche pyramid in competitive exclusion with other top predators: i.e. large cats. In order to survive, the earliest strategy adopted by human populations were those of niche diversification and niche generalization, requiring high levels of mobility and relatively small and flexible group formations that were most highly responsive to alternating environmental circumstances.

2. subsequent development of cultural patterns were tied to the alteration of food-getting and processing strategies that permitted lower energy costs per returns of food value, increasing security and increasing the potentiality of reproductive growth. Waterways adaptations to lacustrian, lotic and coastal systems were an important intermediate adaptation, as were the pre-pastoral reliance upon great herds of ungulates.

3. This process led eventually to multiple forms of plant and animal domestication, early forms featuring the domestication of horses, possibly reindeer, dogs, pigs, cattle, as well as many different kinds of plants and cereal cultigens like barley, early strains of wheat, rice, yam, taro, sago, bananas & plantains, etc. In this regard, it would be important to ask what pre-domesticated strains and patterns might have been like, such as broad-cast planting and harvesting of wild strains of rice, etc.

We can understand the net energy balance in human eco-systems in terms of the amount of free energy that could be achieved from any particular mixed or heterogeneous strategy that would be adopted by a group of a certain size. We can assume that in any given context, low energy expenditure would be the preferred pattern over high energy expenditure. We can assume as well that high energy returns would be preferred over low energy returns. We can expect a calculus in foraging strategy that would attempt to optimize gains over costs. The general pattern therefore was the following kind of game theory framework:

	Low energy returns +1	High energy returns + 2
High energy expenditures -2	(-2 + 1) = -1	(-2 + 2) = 0
Low energy expenditures -1	(-1 + 1) = 0	(-1 + 2) = +1

It is evident in this model that we can derive correlation coefficients of systems relative to their total inputs and outputs. For any real system to be effective, it would depend upon a positive correlation between low energy expenditures (of human physical effort) and reasonably high energy returns (per unit of human effort). Systems must at least break even in this formula, and will soon go extinct if they fail or achieve a high negative correlation. As a result, humans have learned through information and know-how to substitute the labor or work of other animals to maximize their gains while minimizing their own expenditures. Much of the other "animals" have been other humans, and this formula underlies our history of complex social stratification. Domestication has represented a process of systematically substituting the labor of other animals in the management and procurement of increased resources. Later on, industrialization permitted humans to substitute physical machinery, coupled to natural energy sources, to drive sophisticated systems of production that tended to displace human labor. It cannot be said that the efficiency ratios under these alternative developments of second and third order systems were necessarily absolutely efficient per unit energy consumed, but it can be said that these systems tend to provide more stability and hence food-getting security for human populations, and relative to human labor, they provided net greater return. At the same time, these breakthroughs that permitted greater system stability at the same time provided a platform for dramatically increased population densities to be permanently sustained. It gave rise therefore also to new forms of social organization and new problems and issues that have yet to be solved.

Human population growth would be made possibly only under circumstances where favorable environmental conditions permitted favorable food-getting strategies and minimized negative selection. These would be the preferred locations-systems that humans would have found and they would have invented for themselves means to achieve this preferred pattern of pro-adaptive systems via adoption of various modalities of cultural selection (the use of know-how & information) to achieve either: 1. Higher energy systems; 2. Higher net gains in systems.

There were two general tendencies in human systems:1. the drive towards adaptation at lower eco-trophic niche levels, which permitted greater net energy returns in terms of total biomass of human systems; 2. the drive towards higher eco-trophic niche levels, which permitted humans to survive as secondary and even tertiary consumers which entailed that humans operated at lower overall biomass.

As long as these tendencies were achieved primarily through patterns of natural selection, the drive towards 1. Usually meant a form of adaptive-niche specialization and probably higher levels of predation. Thus, as long as this was primarily a naturally mediated processes through genetic character displacement, such groups would have run a high risk of extinction. 2. The alternate pattern entailed a form of adaptive-niche generalization and diversification, which entailed maximization of populations but at a narrower base near the top. This would have resulted in competitive exclusion of possible interspecific predators, and would have been evolutionarily the preferred pattern of development.

Human cultural systems achieve mostly a balance between these two tendencies, except in regions that prevent one or the other from occurring, such as in extremely cold or extremely hot and dry climates where plant productivity is comparatively lower.

We must distinguish between natural selection patterns, both positive and negative, as well as, in human systems, what can be called cultural selection patterns that were both positive and negative. Cultural selection factors can only be construed within an eco-evolutionary framework if they result in some form of natural selection pattern. Cultural selection factors therefore represent of form of indirect natural selection. The general trend over time was an increase in cultural selection factors and a decrease in influence of direct negative selection factors. This indirection was mediated within human cultural systems that achieved greater work load and/or greater efficiency and therefore carried heavier informational load and/or greater communicational efficiency.