Towards Quantitatively Understanding the Complexity of Social-Ecological Systems——From Connection to Consilience

The complexity of social-ecological systems(SES) is rooted in the outcomes of node activities connected by network topology. Thus far, in network dynamics research, the connectivity degree(CND), indicating how many nodes are connected to a given node, has been the dominant concept. However, connectivity focuses only on network topology, neglecting the crucial relation to node activities, and thereby leaving system outcomes largely unexplained. Inspired by the phenomenon of ‘‘consensus of wills and coordination of activities' ' often observed in disaster risk management, we propose a new concept of network characteristic, the consilience degree(CSD),aiming to measure the way in which network topology and node activities together contribute to system outcomes. The CSD captures the fact that nodes may assume different states that make their activities more or less compatible.Connecting two nodes with in/compatible states will lead to outcomes that are un/desirable from the perspective of the SES in question. We mathematically prove that the CSD is a generalized CND, and the CND is a special case of CSD. As a general, fundamental concept, the CSD can facilitate the development of a new framework of network properties, models, and theories that allows us to understand patterns of network behavior that cannot be explained in terms of connectivity alone. We further demonstrate that a co-evolutionary mechanism can naturally improve the CSD. Given the generality of co-evolution in SES, we argue that the CSD is an inherent attribute rather than an artificial concept, which underpins the fundamental importance of the CSD to the study of SES.

Social Scale and Collective Computation:Does Information Processing Limit Rate of Growth in Scale?

Collective computation is the process by which groups store and share information to arrive at decisions for collective behavior.How societies engage in effective collective computation depends partly on their scale.Social arrangements and technologies that work for small-and mid-scale societies are inadequate for dealing effectively with the much larger communication loads that societies face during the growth in scale that is a hallmark of the Holocene.An important bottleneck for growth may be the development of systems for persistent recording of information(writing),and perhaps also the abstraction of money for generalizing exchange mechanisms.Building on Shin et al.,we identify a Scale Threshold to be crossed before societies can develop such systems,and an Information Threshold which,once crossed,allows more or less unlimited growth in scale.We introduce several additional articles in this special issue that elaborate or evaluate this Thresholds Model for particular types of societies or times and places in the world.