THE THIRD WAVE
He suggests that evolution itself may be seen as a process leading toward increasingly complex and diversified biological and social organisms, through the emergence of new, higher-order dissipative structures. Thus, according to Prigogine, whose ideas have political and philosophical resonance as well as purely scientific meaning, we develop “order out of fluctuation” or, as the title of one of his lectures expresses it, “Order out of Chaos.”
This evolution, however, cannot be planned or predetermined in a mechanistic fashion. Until quantum theory came along, many leading Second Wave thinkers believed that chance played little or no role in change. The starting conditions of a process predetermined its outcome. Today in subatomic physics, for example, it is widely believed that chance dominates change. In recent years many scientists, like Jacques Monod in biology, Walter Buckley in sociology, or Maruyama in epistemology and cybernetics, have begun to fuse these opposites.
Prigogine’s work not only combines chance and necessity but actually stipulates their relationship to one another. In brief, he strongly suggests that at the precise point at which a structure “leaps” to a new stage of complexity, it is impossible, in practice and even in principle, to predict which of many forms it will take.* But once a pathway has been chosen, once the new structure comes into being, determinism dominates once more.
In one colorful example he describes how termites create their highly structured nests out of apparently unstructured activity. They begin by crawling about a surface in random fashion, stopping here and there to deposit a bit of “goo.** These deposits are distributed by chance, but the substance contains a chemical attractant so that other termites are drawn to it.
In this way, the goo begins to collect in a few places, gradually building up into a pillar or wall. If these buildups are isolated, work stops. But if by chance they are near one another, an arch results that then becomes the basis for the complex architecture of the nest. What begins with random activity turns into highly elaborate nonrandom structures. We see, as Prigogine puts it, “the spontaneous formation of coherent structures.” Order out of chaos.
* This presumably goes for the leap from Second Wave to Third Wave civilization as well as for chemical reactions.
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