Gradient Adaptive Dynamics Describes Innovation and Resilience at the Society Scale

Abstract

Simulating a complex system like a human society faces an inherent challenge: On the one hand, a simulation requires an underlying model, i.e., a target-oriented and simplified mapping of the system (Stachowiak 1973). On the other hand, the observations we make about societies, e.g., about the foraging-farming transition (Boserup 1965), are a result of complex interaction patterns between many agents possessing a multitude of individual strategies, preferences, and options to act (Shanks and Tilley 1987). No model captures the full complexity of a society, by definition. No simulation can reproduce the full spectrum of observations in a society, by definition. Observing Stachowiak’s (1973) definition, the target-orientation in modeling means to reduce the complexity of a system such that certain aspects of the modeled system are described that help to answer a specific set of (research) questions. The challenge in modeling is to isolate these few important aspects and to describe the processes that govern their evolution.