THE THIRD WAVE
Yet another leap in understanding occurs when we further recognize that these change reducers and amplifiers are not necessarily built into biological or social systems from the beginning; they may be absent at first, then grow into place, as it were, sometimes as a result of what amounts to chance. A stray event can thus trigger a fantastic chain of unexpected consequences.
This tells us why change is so often hard to track and extrapolate, so filled with surprise. It is why a slow, steady process can suddenly convert into an explosive change, or vice versa. And this in turn explains why similar starting conditions may lead to sharply dissimilar outcomes—an idea alien to the Second Wave mentality.
The Third Wave causality that is gradually taking shape pictures a complex world of mutually interacting forces, a world filled with astonishment, with change amplifiers as well as reducers and many other elements as well—not just billiard balls clacking predictably and endlessly against one another on the cosmic pool table. It is a world far stranger than simple Second Wave mechanisms suggested.
Is everything predictable in principle, as Second Wave mechanical causality implied? Or are things inherently, unavoidably unpredictable, as critics of mechanism have insisted? Are we governed by chance or necessity?
Third Wave causality has exciting new things to say about this ancient contradiction as well. In fact, it helps us escape at last from the either/or trap that for so long has pitted de-terminists against anti- determinists—necessity against chance. And this may be its most important philosophical breakthrough.
THE TERMITE LESSON
Dr. Ilya Prigogine and his teams of co-workers at the Free University of Brussels and the University of Texas at Austin have struck directly at Second Wave assumptions by showing how chemical and other structures leap to higher stages of differentiation and complexity through a combination of chance and necessity. It is for this work that Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Born in Moscow, brought to Belgium as a child, and fas-
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