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Sociology and Human Ecology
Traditionally, Sociology has identified its subject matter as a distinct set –

social phenomena – that can be taken as quite different and largely disconnected
from potentially relevant disciplines such as Psychology, Economics or
Planetary Ecology.
Within Sociology and Human Ecology, Smith and Jenks argue that this
position is no longer sustainable. Indeed, exhorting the reader to confront
human ecology and its relation to the physical and biological environments,
Smith and Jenks suggest that the development of understanding with regard
to the position occupied by the social requires, in turn, an extension of the
component disciplines and methodologies of a ‘new’ human socio-ecology.
Aiming to evoke critical change to the possibility, status and range of the
social sciences whilst also offering essential grounding for interdisciplinary
engagement, Sociology and Human Ecology will appeal to postgraduate stu-
dents and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Social Theory,
Socio-Biology and Ecological Economics.
John A. Smith is a Principal Lecturer and Research Lead in the Department

of Education & Community Studies at the University of Greenwich, UK.
Chris Jenks is a Sociologist, and has previously occupied the positions of Vice
Chancellor and Principal of Brunel University London, and Pro-Vice Chan-
cellor and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College University of
London, UK.
Complexity in Social Science
https://www.routledge.com/Complexity-in-Social-Science/book-series/CISS
This interdisciplinary series encourages social scientists to embrace a com-

plex systems approach to studying the social world. A complexity approach
to the social world has expanded across the disciplines since its emergence in
the mid-to-late 1990s, and this can only continue as disciplines continue to
change, data continue to diversify, and governance and responses to global
social issues continue to challenge all involved. Covering a broad range of
topics from big data and time, globalization and health, cities and inequality,
and methodological applications, to more theoretical or philosophical
approaches, this series responds to these challenges of complexity in the social
sciences – with an emphasis on critical dialogue around, and application of
these ideas in, a variety of social arenas as well as social policy.
The series will publish research monographs and edited collections between
60,000–90,000 words that include a range of philosophical, methodological
and disciplinary approaches, which enrich and develop the field of social
complexity and push it forward in new directions.
David Byrne is Emeritus Professor at the School of Applied Social Sciences,

Durham University, UK.
Brian Castellani is Professor in Sociology and Head of the Complexity in
Health and Infrastructure Group, Kent State University, USA. He is also
Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, Northeastern Ohio Medical University.
Emma Uprichard is Associate Professor and Deputy Director at the Centre
for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, UK. She is also
co-director of the Nuffield, ESRC, HEFCE funded Warwick Q-Step Centre.
Agile Actors on Complex Terrains

Transformative Realism and Public Policy
Graham Room
Social Synthesis
Finding Dynamic Patterns in Complex Social Systems
Philip Haynes

Complexity and Post-Humanist Perspectives
John A. Smith and Chris Jenks
Complexity and Post-Humanist
Perspectives
John A. Smith and Chris Jenks

First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 John A. Smith and Chris Jenks
The right of John A. Smith and Chris Jenks to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 9781138230095 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781315387024 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Ontology from the perspective of complexity
theory: auto-eco-organisation 6
2 The strengths and limitations of the concept of
social construction 31
3 The ontological status of the living: a renewed foundation for
epistemology and representation 50
4 Human cognition and development 81
5 The social, structure and the emotions 109
6 The challenge of ecological economics 131
7 Philosophy and method for an ecological-political economy 151
References 176
Index 182
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Humans are social beings. Wilson’s (1970) Sociobiology emphasises this with
the term eusocial which indicated that humans are inconceivable except as
social beings. Peterson and Somit (2001) chart the rise of and issues presented
by this reorientation of the human behavioural and social sciences. In turn,
this volume rests on a particular interpretation of human eusociality.
Maynard-Smith (1982) proposed the concept of an evolutionary stable
strategy (ESS) which has become influential. In this context it says that
eusociality is the ESS of the human species. For us, two points follow. First,
we did not ‘invent’ – so to speak – the ESS of being social. Many precursor
species, including ants and dogs have exploited it. Second, nevertheless, each
reinvention of the social is a species-specific ESS.
In turn this can lead to two opposing paradigms in theorising human
behaviour and culture. The first may be termed human ethology which prior-
itises the constants of human behaviour: that which predates but is expressed
in societies and cultures. The second we term sociology which prioritises the
astonishing ability of humans to adapt and reinvent, indeed dominate, a
socially constructed environment, or ‘cultures’. The first may be said to study
human nature, the second, human invention.
Our position is different. We take our ESS to be first a strategy for survival.
This is to invoke two ‘constants’ which, seemingly paradoxically but actually
necessarily, are also variable agents: the human in its specific and varied forms
of expression vis á vis an environment of multiple forms. This ESS, then can
be better expressed as a dynamic that may be at, near, or far-from equilibrium.
The close relations of this dynamic to others is the subject of Chapter 1. For
the moment we want to emphasise that, compared to both ethology and
sociology, our sense of the human ESS sees both humans and their environ-
ment as the fundamental relation of ground, cause, resource, structure and
agency. Any behaviourist or constructionist extreme is therefore ruled out as a
denial of the that relational, ontological origin. Hence the term human
ecology.
This allows the development of a concept of survival-related human need.
We cannot reconstruct ourselves at will ex nihilo. However the concept of free
will is central to both religious doctrine and the humanist enlightenment, and
2 Sociology and Human Ecology
must indeed be respected. It consists for us primarily in the uniquely devel-
oped ability of humans to assess and modify the efficacy of their species-
environment relations. This is an economy of judgement and awareness that is
absent for the social insect, present but limited in dogs, dolphins or apes, but
extreme in its presence, implications and outcomes for humans. To such an
extent that according to, for example, Alexander (1989) human conspecifics
become both the greatest asset and the greatest danger to our survival. Hence
the need for extreme, intelligent social awareness. This is the conflicted ESS to
which we are necessarily bound. Given its ‘success’ in establishing human
domination of the planet, we are entering a new phase of evolution – the
Anthropocene (Davies 2016) – as potentially catastrophic as it is promising.
The human form of society is then no less an ESS, with the emphasis on
‘stable’ than that of insects or apes but it is radically more open to assess-
ment, modification, reassessment and reinvention than theirs. Additionally we
have harnessed technologies to our purposes in a way that no other living
being has done. At the same time we are subject, and so are the meanings we
invoke and invent, to the constraints and resources of our physical environ-
ment. In this sense, human ESS is uniquely ‘plastic’ but by no means simply
free, even when, especially when, we dominate the planet. We change what we
can change, when we can change it; we take up ‘the next adjacent possible’
when possible. Plasticity is not uniform, nor guaranteed. The opportunity to
‘construct’ – to exercise power – is asymmetrical, subject to all manner of
actual constraint, both human and non-human. It is, then, ecological; and as
ecological it is both complex and ‘post-humanist’ since the influence and
dynamics of many forms of interactive constraint, resource and agency must
be at the centre of the paradigm. We intend, then, to explore the implications
of that imperative.
One of those implications is distributed throughout the chapters. It is the
need to embrace the probabilistic as opposed to either the arbitrary or the
certain. We will therefore make regular use of so-called fuzzy logic, not
because it is less precise but because it is more accurate to suggest that
something may be true to a degree.
Chapter 1 ‘Ontology from the perspective of complexity theory’ re-engages
the traditional problematics of ontology and epistemology through two key
concepts: deterministic chaos and auto-eco-organisation. Both, in turn, need
a further conception of dynamic momenta: systems far-from-equilibrium, that
are capable of evolving. Taken together, they suggest that systems, both non-
living, living, and related to the living (ecologies, societies, markets, technol-
ogies) are neither fixed nor chaotic in the formal sense but have dynamics
histories (they are path-dependent) and ecological opportunities to evolve into
the ‘next-adjacent-possible’. Key to these considerations are the work of
Prigogine, Kauffmann, Morin and Bak.
Chapter 2 ‘The strengths and limitations of the concept of social construc-
tion’ considers the history of the development of the concept of social con-
struction in Marx, Weber and Durkheim. In particular we criticise the
Introduction 3
concept of social phenomena as sui generic as a severe limitation on ecological
analysis. We propose the term ‘auto-exo-reference’ as the epistemological
counterpart of auto-eco-organisation. Drawing on the attempted synthesis
between critical realism and constructionism in the work of Elder-Vass, we
consider the idiomatic limits of a primarily discursive version of con-
structivism and critically review its dependence on Saussure, pointing out that
an alternative semiotic tradition, derived from Charles Sanders Peirce and
active now in the form of biosemiotics, generates quite different parameters.
Chapter 3 ‘The ontological status of the living’ is perhaps the most extreme
point of departure from the routine limits of social science and the assertion
of a new interdisciplinary imperative. There is an entire and persuasive critique
in biosemiotics that anthroposemiosis (human signs and language) has mis-
taken the part (the human part) for the whole of a biosemiotic-zoosemiotic
universe ‘perfused with signs’. Socio-critical theory seems to be completely
unaware of the critique and its implications. The first task is to explicate that
theory which rests on a triadic and ecological theory of the sign. The further
specific content listed below is intended to introduce and show the variety of
approaches and issues raised by writers within biosemiotics and how they
may inform complexity-oriented social science. However, we again differ from
the strictly biological in placing perception not in the organism, (nor in the
environment) but following complexity theory an emergent outcome of the
relation. Whilst part-suggested by Dennett, we consider this to be a funda-
mentally new departure for an ecological epistemology. Further, this new
landscape, or space, is central to social theory as human ecology because it
sets out semantic causality in relation to (not estranged from) physical caus-
ality. This post-Cartesian development has been hinted at many times but, to
our knowledge, has not been developed to this extent.
We argue that an ecological epistemology – auto exo-reference – is the
necessary outcome of an ontology of complex emergence, auto-eco-organisation.
None of these requirements are met by the simply self-referential domain of
‘social’ phenomena or the self-referential concept of social construction. This
is a radical re-ecology. Taken together, these concepts place the role of affor-
dances at the centre of ecological possibility and complex emergence. Key authors
for this chapter are Hoffmeyer, Deely, Uexküll, Kull, Shapiro, Dennett, J.
Gibson and E. Gibson.
Chapter 4 ‘Human cognition and development’ is in two parts. The first
deals with considerable advances in evolutionary psychology and child devel-
opment, in particular the question of why it should take so long compared
with other species and its emotional content.
The second deals with postnatal plasticity, a concept explicitly developed within
evolutionary psychology and contrasting sharply but interacting with con-
ventional notions of social construction. Of particular interest is the challenging
argument that a developmental spectrum is applicable in both childhood
and adulthood.
We examine these both at the level of learning theory and adult develop-
ment/adaptation to new social formations. In particular we want to stress the
dimensions of human need for childhood, adolescence and adulthood rather
than the simpler concepts of social construction. We take these foundations to
be the unavoidable ground of complexity in human, social and environmental
relations rather than matters of convention that ‘could have been otherwise’.
Similarly, the course of complex social dynamics is seen as both path depen-
dent and exploring the next adjacent possible following the preliminary ana-
lyses of these concept in earlier chapters. Differently put, the human as a
species is placed at the centre of ‘affordances’ for the complex dynamics of
human social possibility. The effect, we suggest, is to ‘restore’ the dimensions
of the preconditions of the social to their proper place in a reformed sociology:
we cannot simply begin with sui generic social phenomena as Durkheim and
the traditional name of discipline suggests. This is at least part of the ‘recon-
ciliation’ of the social sciences and relevant disciplines. Key authors in this chapter
are Kosko, J. Gibson, E. Gibson and Pick, Kegan, Reiners and Lockwood,
Tooby and Cosmides, Abel, Bjorklund and Pellegrini, Stacey, Turner and
Stets.
Chapter 5 ‘The social, structure and the emotions’ topicalises the emotional
and behavioural content that is associated with forms of social organisation.
In this sense it mirrors the previous section but from the point of view of
the structural demands of the collective. Member, collective and environ-
ment are seen as mutually causal, that is, in a manner appropriate to complex
auto-eco-organisation.
Whilst we shall return to the traditional themes of sociology (discussed in
Chapter 2) on the (human) construction of solidarity we shall also consider
the idea of the social as pre-human survival strategy and the functions of
differentiation that this implies. Whilst this suggests that ‘the social’ is a
recognisable ‘independent’ structural phenomenon (so far as that is possible
ecologically) it is also recognisable as having distinct and strong levels of
variation. Characteristically, for the complex, the persistence of structure in
dynamic variation is not seen as a contradiction but as a condition. Conse-
quently we topicalise both the heterodoxy that informs post-structuralism and the
strongly structural dynamics that inform cultural theory and post-humanist
descriptions.
A particular focus will be the distinction argued by Chance (1988) and
developed by TenHouten (2007) between agonic-hierarchical and hedonic-
cooperative social formations and their emotional states. This draws in part
on Durkheim’s distinction between the mechanical and the organic and is
developed, though not explicitly, in so-called cultural theory (CT). Thomp-
son’s mapping of differential forms of solidarity, worldview and correspond-
ing emotional stance is a major focus. Other key authors are Ortner,
Herbrechter, and Sewell.
Chapter 6 ‘The challenge of ecological economics’ takes the view that
member, collective and environment are mutually causal. This section
Introduction 5
topicalises economic worldviews and the ecological consequences of con-
temporary relations of socio-economic production. Given that human society
is at least one of the most dominant influences in terrestrial ecology, we pro-
pose to ask whether this is sustainable or instead that our current position
reflects a path dependency on resource use that is coming to an end due to the
growth of human population. Put differently: is the assumption of human
agency that finally grounds all concepts of social construction coming to a
point where its limitations are ecologically visible? This, so to speak, is the
practical endpoint of critical post-humanism. From its origin as an ethical-
critical stance, it is fast becoming a form of political economy and a possible
imperative of governance. This is intended as an introduction, or a sketchmap
of the arena in which complexity theory and its applied methodologies will be
played out. Key authors are Costanza et al., Hawken et al., Munz and
Rieterer.
Chapter 7 ‘Philosophy and method for an ecological-political economy’
considers how our enterprise is misunderstood as a demand for polymathic
understandings. Complete knowledge cannot be suggested, especially where
non-deterministic, non-linear probabilities are the phenomena in question.
Quite the converse: our analyses of complex interaction will necessarily tend
toward the probabilistic. But an ecological focus is possible as the more
familiar forms of terrestrial ecology exemplify. We argue instead that sociol-
ogy is an imperative part of any human ecology. Our claim, then, is for the
more modest and pragmatic establishment of interdisciplinarity. That will
involve stretching the established content of disciplines and/or the recruitment
of inter-disciplinary teams. Either way, the concept of sui generic social phe-
nomena, strictly speaking, cannot be sustained in an ecological-political
economy. In this chapter we propose a consequent initiative, an immature
methodology, to which we invite discussion and contribution. There are,
however, certain imperatives which we discuss in detail. Key authors here are
Allen and Hoekstra, Morin, Kauffman, Plutynski, and Byrne and Callaghan.
1 Ontology from the perspective
of complexity theory
Auto-eco-organisation
‘In Kant’s definition … Being is merely the positing of the copula between the
subject and the predicate.’
(Heidegger 1973: 65)
‘The modern form of ontology is transcendental philosophy which becomes

epistemology.’
(Heidegger 1973: 88)
It seems that Heidegger’s grim characterisation is unavoidable.1 Every ontol-

ogy is the output of an ‘ontologist’, or more generally, dependent on an out-
look, a worldview, a paradigm. To say the least, ontology and epistemology
must be intertwined. Garfinkel’s (1967/1984) ironic characterisation of the
sociologist ‘expert’ and the lay person as ‘cultural dope’ implies that we are
all ontologists of a kind. It is rather a question of degree or position. ‘Mem-
bers’ may take their ontological bearings from, say, religion, political com-
mitment, economic ambition, or ethical preferences. ‘Members’ called
sociologists carry a particular if not entirely definable baggage of ontologies
and epistemologies derived from ‘the literature’. That is a key limit.
If we move beyond a strictly human perspective (e.g. Hoffmeyer 1996) each
species does not so much ‘do ontology’ but rather inhabits its own con-
structed ‘world’ – or umwelt. The human species characteristically requires
that its inner world be placed in question but the inner world is the only
resource for that questioning. Animals are not routinely assumed to have that
sort of reflection. That, we think, is questionable: animals may be intelligent
or ‘reflective’ to a degree. Humans can be reasonably said to at least try to
take that to an extreme. Yet the extreme forms are themselves idiomatic:
philosophies, ideologies, grand narratives.
We appear to be in a stalemate. Either we admit to overwhelming ignor-
ance: the Socratic stance, discussed below; or we (re)solve the problem by
practised ignorance: the pragmatic stance. We shall examine both below. The
former’s contemporary elaboration is critical deconstruction; the latter’s is
scientific method. Lyotard’s (1984) disbelief in metanarratives coupled with
‘performativity’ seem to imply an undefined, even undefinable, middle ground
Ontology and complexity theory 7
compatible with the kind of social interpretations routinely made by Garfin-
kel’s ‘members’. The use of the possessive is of course both ironic and
instructive.
Our specific aim in this book is to show that this apparent stalemate is both
idiomatic and at least to a degree surmountable.
Attention and ignorance

Ignorance is not so much a pejorative term as a condition of the relation
between a finite organism (however biologically, socially or culturally exten-
ded) and a potentially infinite (though actually an extended) set of spatio-
temporal possibilities.2 Every point of view, any ‘directed’ glance, every
adaptation, physical or cognitive involves a dialectic of attention-involvement
and ignorance-foreclosure. Ignorance-attention is intended here as something
practised, something organised, something structurally coupled, in the very
being of a species, a paradigm, a culture, a technology. However, that does
not ‘solve’ the risk of choosing to attend to, or, to ignore. It is the elective
aspect in critical tradition that concerns us here. Provisionally stated, the
narrowing of ontology to a set of things that will concern us (and others that
will not) potentially reduces our collective critical faculties and disciplines to
the lesser status of repetitive idiom. This is ignorance in the worst, habitual,
programmatic sense.
The dual character of ignorance: the standpoint of irony

Kierkegaard calls Socrates’ position, the standpoint of irony. Socrates’ posi-
tion is, to use a modern word, ‘underwritten’ by the pronouncement of the
Oracle.
Human Wisdom is worth little or nothing … he amongst you is the

wisest, who like Socrates, knows that this wisdom is worth nothing at
all … His wisdom is the knowledge of the negativity of all finite content.
(Kierkegaard 1965: 67–9)
The phrase – ‘the negativity of all finite content’ – is decisive here. It does
not distinguish between mundane claims to reason such as ‘fire is dangerous’
and elaborate institutional forms of what has become known as ‘social con-
struction’. Indeed that very term, implying conventionality in the strict
sense – ‘could have been otherwise’ – circumvents the obvious criticism that
however limited our concept of reality, we are stuck with it, even adapted for
survival by it. A clear case is visual perspective, a necessary ‘distortion’ of the
‘real’ environment.
It is this ‘all’ finite content – everything is socially constructed and inau-
thentic – that betrays the standpoint of irony as an idiom rather than a
selective, critical perspective. It is ‘always’ apt: hence the term, ‘underwritten’.
It is the totalising ‘all’ that permits the standpoint of irony, or the credibility
of the social construction of ‘reality’ that permits the idiomatic ignorance of
‘finite content’ even when it is compelling. (Such as: fire is dangerous; we can
and must learn to control it, even before, without ‘fully’, understanding it.)
Differently put, the statement – ‘His wisdom is the knowledge of the nega-
tivity of all finite content’ – is a clear contradiction, or if you prefer, literally
nonsense because ‘finite content’ permits so many contradictory predicates
that it cannot be a viable category in the first place. ‘All finite content’ can be
said; so can ‘a cross between a sparrow and an elephant’. It deserves the same
level of credibility. But the habitual, misplaced formalism of the idioms of
‘critical’ irony have become normal. We should return to Kierkegaard’s (1965)
largely ignored view that Socrates’ ‘critical’ irony actually consists in the
blanket refusal to take anything seriously. This is literally practised ignorance,
not critical evaluation.
The lingering sense remains, though, that a statement cannot be true unless
it is absolutely true and in order to meet that condition one needs to know
every relevant relationship. Does ‘heat’ or ‘gravity’ or ‘visual perception’
require the same sort of qualification? Or everyday statements such as, ‘the
meat is cooked’. We must answer ‘no’ and in so doing indicate why Aristotle
is not the obvious recourse ‘after Plato’. Aristotelian logic still prefers,
requires, either/or, true or not true. If only the Oracle had been more dis-
cerning, more reasonable, and said some finite content! But then Socrates
could not be so special. If only Aristotle had set more fluid limits. But then
philosophy could not be so exalted when compared to mundane utterance. We
would also be taking the first steps to fuzzy logic. In place of Platonic nega-
tion and Aristotelian true or false, we confront the problematic (non)viability
of our perceptions and statements being true or false to a degree and the
varied pragmatics of sufficiency for purpose. This is indeed mundane, con-
tested and potentially democratic, egalitarian or pluralist; certainly not with-
out political risk. How many discursive positions you detest may have to be
taken seriously as true to a degree, or worse, sufficient for purpose?
In the interim, we point out that our wordings, addressed to you, assume
that we ‘do’ ontology on the basis of shared idioms which, we argue, can now
be radically questioned. The means by which we break out and question
such idioms is by opening them to interdisciplinarity. This, too, is not without
risk.
The dual character of ignorance: pragmatism

The standpoint of pragmatism operates in reverse. It has maximum viability
where cause-effect relationships can be isolated, so that the issues of ‘all’
human representation has (at least) less relevance. It is therefore possible to
say with certainty that, for example, a certain bacterium, multiplying in cer-
tain conditions, will result in cholera. The ‘social construction’ of London’s
sewerage systems in the mid-19th century was a consequent, certain, necessity.
Convention had nothing much to do with it. Nor, at the time, did incomplete
knowledge stop the government’s action, nor the engineer Bazalgette’s ability
to meet the apparently insurmountable with sufficient innovation.
The pragmatic critic, then, is definitely not Socratic, not a critical formalist,
not a critical ironist. This critic is deadly serious and regularly subjects both
education and experimentation to strict standards of adequacy. They may, of
course, be wrong. The history of medicine is full of such ‘disciplines’ that
turned out to be errors because the discipline interrogated itself. This does not
in any way guarantee that the new outlook is ‘right’ but to stage some sort of
return (to, say, blood-letting) becomes close to impossible. Or again, the for-
merly ‘efficient’ use of antibiotics has turned out to have unexpected and
unintended consequences. It may be that such disciplines are resistant to self-
criticism but formalism and irony are simply irrelevant. Self-criticism even if
in the sense of the expert other is the only available recourse, even if the
expert turns out to be somewhat inexpert. That inevitability seems central to
so many opposites, from sharia law to theoretical physics, from political
economy to film theory.
What distinguishes this critical stance from others is the assumption of
knowledgeable responsibility. It is assumed that the ‘expert’ in whatever sense
is capable of understanding the ontology of the phenomenon in question to
the point of sufficiently predicting future outcomes. This is a highly elastic
and probably devolved position. We seem to have arrived at fuzzy logic yet
again. Knowledgeable-responsibility is conceded, accepted, distributed to a
degree. The more complex the problem, the less decidable is what counts as
expertise and so also responsibility. Health and education policies, for example,
are sites of such dispute.
The strategic ignorance of this pragmatic standpoint, then, relates to the
circumscription of the highly specific phenomenon as something that can be
‘safely’ regarded as having trivial connectedness with its environment. Part of
this (non) interconnectedness is the expectation that the specific circumscrip-
tion will remain reasonably static. That is the basis of the discipline.3 Our
discussion of Morin (below) will offer a critique of this assumption of isola-
tion. The identified discipline may have to evolve and change but that can
reasonably be expected to be (sort of) cumulative. Despite the interventions of
such critics as Kuhn (1970) or Latour (1993, 2004), the processes of science,
normal or not, remain to a degree coherent, pragmatic and even progressive
for the community in which they are active. Nor is this even primarily a
question of science. The pragmatic standpoint is relevant to every occasion
where it is reasonable to say that the phenomenon in question is well enough
understood by competent members so that prediction of likely outcomes is
possible. We, as communities of practice, may be stretching what is reasonable
but, concretely and routinely, we put all manner of people in this position:
politicians, teachers, managers, the police, economists. And yes, the fuzzy
description (Kosko 1994) to a degree becomes ever more appropriate and the
possibility of dispute ever more proportionate: dangerous territory. This is
why critical sociologists of science and technology are much safer sticking to
deconstruction and irony. Who from that field would dare to risk being plain
wrong – or even worse, plausibly right? That would be to step outside (what
passes for) a critical stance; to become pragmatic, politically aligned, socially
located, not unlike the (technocratic) actor-experts we claim to ‘critically’
examine.
The plurality of ignorance and ‘complexity’

The traditional polarities of sociology – critical deconstructionism and so-
called ‘positivism’ – reflect the problematics described above. Whatever their
relative strengths they are often mutual caricatures. More importantly, they
exclude the majority fuzzy middle, the place where other members and other
species construct ‘ontologies’ and their surrogates. Put differently, decon-
struction employs the assurance of irony: all human wisdom; whilst positi-
vism employs the notion of sufficiency. Both are forms of ignorance:
respectively of difference and interconnectedness. Complexity theory topica-
lises precisely these dimensions. On the one hand it describes self-organised
emergence (difference) but on the other recognises that is possible only on the
basis of macro or eco-interaction. Crucially, these processes are also ‘evident’
in the sense of disclosing themselves to organisms capable of responding to
the environment in which they take place. Emergence can then be said in the
loosest sense to ‘inform’ – that is, to have effect upon – both the physical and
biological (proximate) spheres. We do not take a ‘deep’ ecological position
here: everything affects everything else. Nor do we take a ‘shallow’ one:
interactions are local. The degree of interconnectedness is itself an emergent
outcome of interconnection. Fuzzy logic again.
A subtle and very important, different dimension must be elucidated. The
standpoint of irony – critical formalism or ‘guaranteed’ de-constructability –
depends on seeing human ‘standpoints’ as arbitrary by virtue of either position
or convention. Scientific method, in particular the doctrine of experimental
isolation and ‘controls’, is well aware of this problem. Nevertheless its implicit
position does not see phenomena, including human cognition, as arbitrary
but rather as both probabilistic and determinate. Popper’s dismissal of ver-
ification and the less coherent espousal of falsification exemplifies exactly this.
It follows exactly the reasoning of Kant:
Experience teaches us that a thing can be so and so but not that it cannot
be otherwise.
(Kant 1929/1973: 43; section B3)
This is probably the most influential half-truth in contemporary Western

philosophy. Let us use our old example, fire, or another, water. Put experience
of either of these in the proposition and it discloses itself as misplaced
formalism.
Experience teaches us that fire (water), can be so and so but not that it
cannot be otherwise.
More positively it is better, more reasonably, seen as a fuzzy proposition,
true and also false to a degree, acutely dependent on case and circumstance.
Not philosophy so much as ordinary judgement; certainly it is mundane,
contested, pluralistic, and purpose-related.
The overarching, related concept in chaos and complexity theory is coun-
ter-intuitively known as determinate or deterministic chaos.4 We are well
aware of the problems this concept brings with it. Many descriptions are
possible. We shall avoid, for the moment, more formal and mathematical
descriptions. This is actually also a very mundane, if significant, idea.
The mathematical temptation is to isolate and formalise the notions of
chance and probability. We are familiar with the probability of a fair coin
coming up heads or tails being one in two; or a fair dice coming up one face
being one in six. Then the probability of two heads in a row is ½ x ½, three
heads ½ x ½ x ½ etc. For the dice the series would be 1/6 x 1/6, 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6
etc. The elaboration of probability theory then becomes an independent
branch of mathematics such that we can distinguish the actions of chance
itself – pure chance, which we shall deliberately not try to define – and ‘sta-
tistically significant’ difference which implies some more determinate cause. No
one denies the usefulness of these ideas. But a useful idea is not necessarily a
good ecological description.
The series of probabilities associated with the coin and the dice are given by
iteration, their shape, their manufacture, and chance and time. Other key
‘controlled for’ (or ignored) elements are a gravitational field and a flat,
resistant surface. In other words, the ‘independent’ mathematics of probability
are actually dependent on a very specific, deterministic ensemble. To repeat
our formulation above the phenomena – or better, their iterated ecology –
described here are both probabilistic and determinate. Taking that further:
they are only ‘significant’, they exist and claim our attention only as both
probabilistic and determinate. Without both dimensions they could not exist
or be quantified. Conversely, the completely arbitrary cannot exist except as a
formal representation: we can word it, not see it. Nor can it organise itself. It
cannot emerge.
We can then formulate an axiom whose strength and plausibility will rest
on the remainder of the text. Our preliminary is:
Every instance of apparent chaos that can emerge and we can therefore
observe (or confront in any way) is a combination, an ecology, of probabilistic
and determinate elements and time. This is deterministic chaos. We can
translate this as chaos that can emerge or exist. This ordinary idea, then, has
extraordinary consequences.
As is often the case with complexity theory, another key concept is involved
here: emergence, or more accurately self-organising emergence. That is the
key topic of this chapter, indeed of the entire discipline of complexity theory,
so we shall not attempt anything but the briefest description here. Perhaps the
most familiar field of self-organisation is bio-evolution. And its most familiar
counter-theory is creationism, or its new form: intelligent design. Self-emergence
means that the phenomena we encounter, whether biological, physical, or
more controversially, social are self-organised in time. The question is how. More
of that below. For the moment we need a little more precision. Given our
comments on deterministic chaos – the eco-existence of probabilistic and
deterministic dimensions – we prefer self-organisation to be termed auto-eco-
organisation. This is Morin’s (2002) term. The precise meaning and impli-
cations will gradually be addressed. For the moment, let us stress that self-
organisation takes place and where possible, over time, in a given environment.
In another environment, it may be impossible. Let us consider some real-world
examples.
Qualitative emergence – auto-eco-organisation – does not depend on arbi-
trary interactions but on the qualities of the parties/substances involved.
Water, for example will behave in complex, apparently chaotic ways according
to environmental influence but within bounded limits given by its internal
composition and available energy. This is determinate chaos.
On the other hand deterministic chaos (for example in water) can be highly
unpredictable, erratic, scale-related and environmentally shaped. The ‘out-
come’ of a body of water will therefore depend on its volume and position: a
large wave may be harmless or fundamentally destructive. To take a more
human example, an assassination in Sarajevo of a man may be a small event,
but of a certain Archduke, it provided part of the grounds for the hostilities
that became WW1. Differently put: archduke-ness mattered. More formally,
the character of phenomena also matters, especially in interaction. A clear
pattern begins to emerge: matter makes itself evident through temporally-
emergent interaction. Compared to critical formalism, we are in a different
idiom, and universe. Compared to scientific method used in the scrutiny of
discrete processes, evidence and predictability part company. Outcomes seem
disproportionate, beyond expectation, non-linear. Crucially this applies across
fields, earthquakes and economies, human populations and natural ecologies.
Non-linearity then, implies both interaction and interdisciplinarity. On those
qualitative grounds we should avoid turning it into yet another formal idiom.
What does this mean for social theory? Again this must be a preliminary
but the key concept is social construction. Are social constructions to be
taken as self-organising or as auto-eco-organisational? Are they distinct from
biological and psychological phenomena because, as Durkheim (1964: xlix)
argues ‘they arise in different milieu’? Or do they display plasticity and a
complex array of inter-relationships? Perhaps both? How far does an empha-
sis on discursive construction, in Foucault for example, require a reformula-
tion as ‘entangled’ – to use Urry’s (2003) term – with human biology,
technologies, resources, distributive systems, climate and the like? How far is
gender, as a social construct, dependent on or independent of sex as a biolo-
gical phenomenon? How plastic is human culture? Does it display any invar-
iants? How far is it related to the biosphere? How far are human, social
phenomena distinct and how far are they ecological phenomena? We take
that for granted for non-human social species. Remember, we did not invent the
social as a survival strategy. Ants, dogs, apes and others essayed it long before.
How far do we inherit a specific, if plastic, form of community and commu-
nication? How far do Foucault’s very terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’
connote resistance, time, the shaping of emergence?5
Prigogine and systems far-from equilibrium

Given our comments on the idiomatic stalemate of ontology in philosophy
and sociology, it is not surprising that we consider the major advances in
ontology for complexity to have interdisciplinary roots. The first pioneer we
shall consider is Prigogine who won a Nobel Prize (in 1977) for his work.
That alone is recommendation in our view; where others might ground stra-
tegic ignorance in the charge that, as science, it belongs to the ‘dominant
paradigm’. This is contestable neglect. The most accessible and consistent
account can be found in Prigogine and Stengers (1984). A close reading of his
import for social complexity is in Smith and Jenks (2006). Here we shall
attempt an abbreviated, nontechnical description.
Prigogine is less introspective than critical philosophy. He is prepared to
risk offering a plausible explanation for the evolution and self-organisation of
(in this case physical) phenomena. We suggest that we should risk also taking
it to be credible. Others in the social sciences may (and do) prefer to take his the-
ories as ‘metaphors’. That is a position we reject: metaphor, no; true to a degree,
yes. Metaphor invites us back into the stalemate of discursive construction.
Prigogine invites us to engage actual matter and thermal energy in their
interactions and outcomes. We must accept that invitation. That is not to
abandon our critical faculties but to broaden our study. The familiar idioms
of metaphor are insufficient to this challenge.
Prigogine’s work concerns the ‘universal’ (inter)action on and between
thermal energy and matter. ‘Universal’ does not imply homogeneity but
something taking place where and if it can. In this ontology it is crucial to see
that ‘matter’ is not, and cannot be, understood formally. Rather it has to have
a qualitative character that environmentally available thermal energy can
modify over time. The modification must itself be likely or possible which in
turn implies the unlikely and the impossible; both understood qualitatively.
Kauffmann (2008) whom we shall discuss below, calls this ‘the next adjacent
possible’, which implies an extant state of affairs and emergent or evolu-
tionary ‘new’ qualities. The former is called path dependency and the latter we
call qualitative emergence. This is, clearly, a driven dynamic, not entirely spe-
cified by the extant state of affairs but by its interaction with its environment
in its re-energised form. This is entirely consistent with the term ‘determinate
chaos’. Contrasted with ‘chaos’ and discursive construction we confront a
recognisable landscape of actual possibility and impossibility, emerging over
time. And not just the play of epistemes; they too are part of a related
landscape of possible and impossible understandings taking place in a mate-
rial environment that precedes them. Remember the cross between an elephant
and sparrow can only be said. Credibility matters because our ecological
context, as humans, (even ‘post’-humans) is (at least) temporal, material,
cognitive, technological and epistemological, with political-economic effects,
intended or not.
Prigogine contrasts his ‘field’ of temporally-emergent phenomena with
classical mechanics and its deterministic relationships. The latter assumes and
describes stable equilibria whilst he stresses complex reorganisation when
systems are driven far from equilibrium by thermal energy. In simple terms,
the properties mutate over time. This is not to say that stable equilibria are
false but that not all systems are at equilibrium. In the language of our
opening remarks the assumption of stability amounts to a kind of ignorance
which, however principled, will have consequences.
Second, complex emergence typically takes place on a macro scale and
therefore involving (large) numbers of interactive particles. Examples are
instructive here. Whether we are speaking of, say, a liquid or a gas, even
better the atmospheric combination of liquids and gasses, it is the behaviour
of the ensemble at the macro level that matters. ‘Single’ water molecules as liquid or
vapour or ice can again be ‘imagined’ but in reality it is only the interaction
between many molecules that makes these phase changes possible and realis-
able. In the jargon of complexity, such phenomena are self-organised and
emergent from the macro interactions of the ensemble(s). That is why we prefer
the term, auto-eco-organisation. And we stress, interactions are temporal.
Third, such interaction includes a level of randomness or probability and is
therefore ‘statistical’ in nature. It is important here to distinguish between
systems ‘close to’ and ‘far from’ thermal equilibrium. For the former pertur-
bations may simply amount to ‘discountable’ or predictable variations from
the norm. They follow a ‘normal’ Gaussian distribution. The latter are
‘wilder’. They may reposition the ‘norm’ unexpectedly. They may even evolve
into an entirely new landscape of possibility. Such reconstructions tend to
demonstrate irreversibility, another key temporal dimension. A level of ran-
domness is alternatively expressed or perhaps better understood as ‘degrees of
freedom’. But these are themselves determined by the qualitative interaction
of the components.
Therefore and fourth, this process does not ‘ignore’ particles, components,
or indeed members. On the contrary, they become collectively and qualitatively
energised and extremely ‘sensitive’ to small variables such as gravitational or
electrical fields, which at equilibrium would be irrelevant.
Simple examples can be instructive. Heat applied to substances such as
water, iron ore, meat, provokes changes in accord with the character of the
original substances. The outcomes of the changes in turn allow ‘outcomes’
that were not possible in the originals: steam power, tools, more safely digestible
foods, dietary ‘inventions’. Such outcomes are qualitative and directional:
water can be cooled but energy will be lost, tools can be remade but the ore
itself cannot be recovered, eggs cannot be unboiled. The choice here clearly
underlines the social functions of energy use so that even if social phenomena
cannot be wholly ‘explained’ in terms of energetic input and outcome, such
factors are clearly important to social ecology. In sum, eco-sociology needs
(to understand, Prigogine’s) thermodynamics because they are part of the
possibility of ‘social’ phenomena. This is what restricted sociology – in parti-
cular, ‘critical’ realism – cannot engage, because of its dependence on the
restricted subject matter of philosophy. Conversely, an un- (or less) restricted
sociology tends toward an ontology that is post-humanist, and ecological
because it has interdisciplinary perspectives.
However, simple examples cannot convey the extent or range of tempo-
rally-emergent possibility, nor the complexity of path dependency. Let us look
again at the dimensions of randomness or as we prefer it, degrees of freedom.
It is not the case that phenomena in the general or formal sense are subject to
the influence of thermal energy. Whilst this principle can be articulated for-
mally, the actual events are subject to all manner of qualitative possibilities and
limits. For example an energy source that is localised will have local effects. The
material properties of every substance may or may not interact but will have
their own characteristic signature when subject to ‘sufficient’ energy. In this
sense locality and properties together mark out the possibility of freedom
(to interact or not) and (to interact or not) in characteristic, determinate
ways. Differently put, emergence is energetic, spatio-temporally embedded.
Randomness, degrees of freedom, ‘chaos’ are understood as deterministic.
For example, fossil fuels had a relatively small impact on human societies
before industrialisation got under way. The contact and the means of exploi-
tation were undeveloped. Similarly the huge 19th century impact of coal
gradually gave way to oil-powered technologies. Both had enormous influence
on the social relations of production, exchange, distribution, communication and
the environment, natural and urban. Yet their impact was also path depen-
dent. Cities remained often closely tied to earlier means of transport, parti-
cularly seas, waterways, canals. Similarly, established patterns of trade exerted
influence. The growth of capital cities, major centres of production and the
like, relative to others, implies degrees of freedom but not randomness.
Another very clear example is the growth of the ‘Georgian style’ in London’s
architecture. What could be more random or conventional? In fact the style
had as much to do with fire regulations following the Great Fire as it did to
the rediscovery of classical architecture and canons of proportion. We want to
go so far as to assert that freedom and randomness are both ‘qualified’ – subject
to restraint and opportunity – and utterly different. Chance in common sense
usage: the chance to… is far more appropriate than chance in the random,
numerical or statistical sense. Also degrees of freedom links to the theme we
shall meet throughout the argument: fuzzy logic; the idea that something is
true to a degree.
Our final example at this stage is what we routinely call an ‘accident’.
Whether we accidentally crash the car, spill some wine, set fire to the house,
in each and every instance we recognise in the very word ‘accident’ something
that might or might not (have) happen(ed). It could have been otherwise: the
degree of pre-determination is low; statistical probabilities are at work. At a
second level, however, driving too fast, trying to carry too many glasses at
once, overheating a pan, the probabilities rise; the accident becomes more
likely. At the next level, of occurrence, probabilities become yet more certain.
The car will suffer the kind of damage that is characteristic of a car crash, the
wine will wet a lower surface (and if red, stain it), the adjacent, flammable
parts of the house will burn quickly but some parts will resist the heat, if not
entirely. Again we are talking of degrees of determinacy. In what sense is the
term ‘random’ appropriate? Hardly at all.
Whether we are speaking of a relatively homogeneous system such as a
body of fluid, or in the examples above of the interaction of distinct systems
not normally in contact, there is an energised event of instability whose out-
comes are nevertheless deterministic. Prigogine’s analyses of the behaviour of
systems-far-from-equilibrium is, then, about deterministic instabilities. They
may reach new stable equilibria: the crash / the spill / the fire is over. On the
other hand the instability may be persistent, even for most practical (human)
purposes permanent but still determinate. Examples respectively are cities,
ecosystems, climate. Such phenomena are far removed from the characteristic
arbitrary, entirely social conventions of post-structural deconstructions, or
more radically, from the narrowly described social phenomena of Durkheim
or critical realism.
However, Prigogine’s interest is largely in systems of ‘matter’ driven by
energy to far-from or evolving equilibria. Our emphasis is more socio-ecological
and so the application of far-from equilibrium dynamics, whilst instanced
above, needs more explicit justification.
Given our remarks above – that ontology is more credibly what ontologists
do rather than an ‘authentic’ speech about being, but that is where we
humans necessarily find ourselves – where do we stand? The key issue, we
suggest, following Seboek (see Deely 2003) and the tendency of humanism to
be anthropocentric, is not to mistake the part for the whole. Differently put,
we must not ground ontology in humans because we are ontological late-
comers. Prigogine’s decisive advantage as an ontologist is that he grounds
emergence, including its presence, impact and intelligibility in the funda-
mentals, in particular in the second law of thermodynamics. Yes, this is a
human formulation; and no, it has not been contradicted, though there have
been modifications, Prigogine included.6 In this sense Prigogine provides the
fundamental ontology that Heidegger desires but cannot realise (we argue)
within his disciplinary limits: the critique of metaphysics. He remains boun-
ded by humanism and metaphysics, despite his reluctance because there is no
positive, actual, intelligible other, only negation: his so-called ‘destruction of
metaphysics’. More radically put: authenticity is ruled out by humanism pre-
cisely as the pars pro toto fallacy: glottocentrism (Deely 2003: 30). Formal
opposition, the negative, counter-narrative, deconstruction, the standpoint of
irony add nothing. Difference is demanded. So is plausibility. This requirement
beyond humanism may be termed post-humanism.
In stark contrast:
The second law decrees that entropy … always tends to increase. In

practical terms [this] means that in every real heat exchange, some heat is
always lost to useful purposes. Lord Kelvin (William Thompson) called
[this] ‘a universal tendency toward dissipation … [I]f heat is constantly
dissipated, the universe must eventually arrive at a point where no heat
reserves will be left. The temperature would then stabilise slightly above
absolute zero (-273 degrees centigrade) and life of any kind would be
impossible … the so-called ‘heat death’.
(Hayles 1991: 13)
This passage clearly illustrates the difference between ‘equilibrium’ in normal

and specialised usage. Ordinary usage suggests stability, ‘business as usual’,
but in thermodynamics it is associated with entropy. ‘Heat death’ is a postu-
lated, eventual, orderless or undifferentiated equilibrium. Not so much ‘busi-
ness as usual’ as ‘end of business’. Let’s suggest a sort of half-way usage:
equilibrium occurs when what can happen, has happened. By contrast, sys-
tems ‘far-from equilibrium’ are, so to speak, in the course of evolution. Here
we see emerging the constant theme of the difference between ‘classical’ and
evolutionary mechanisms.
Hayles continues:
Prigogine and Stengers argue against this traditional view. They envision
entropy as an engine driving the world towards increasing complexity
rather than death. They calculate that in systems far from equilibrium,
entropy production is so high that local decreases in entropy can occur
without violating the second law. Under certain circumstances, this
mechanism allows a system to engage in spontaneous self-organisation.
(ibid.)
Our most familiar far-from-equilibrium system – hidden in plain sight – is the

patterned evolution of climate, water systems, and bio-ecosystems that we see
on earth. The biotic earth is an excellent example of a new landscape of
possibility compared to prebiotic earth. Prigogine is therefore central to the
fundamental ontology of humankind because we are part of that biosphere.
And not only do we like every animal resist entropic decay by consuming
other parts of the biosphere to replicate ourselves but we also depend on forms
of energetic sustenance to maintain our buildings, activities and cultures. This
again is post-humanism.
It is important to grasp how radical this simple proposition is. There is no
longer any need for onto-theologies of creation. Self-emergence is a sufficient
explanation. Nor is there any need for human-centred creation: we do not
create ex nihilo. We are part of evolutionary emergence: a latecomer at that.
Nor is emergence a random process but instead grows out of the possibilities
afforded by the qualitative interactions that precede it. It is path dependent. So are
we. Again, we term this auto-eco-organisation. That term is, for us, both post-
theocratic and post-humanist. We may now reframe our question on Prigogine’s
relevance for human socio-ecology: How can auto-eco-organisation not be
relevant? Only by that old claim to human uniqueness which has far more to
do with creationist theology than fact. Certainly humans are special, but so
are birds. An animal (a human) in Prigogine’s sense is a dissipative system – it
makes use of energy, some of which is lost. So is a steam engine. We are not
unique. We are different; variations on an ontological theme.
The ontological theme can be formulated quite simply: heat flows and ignis
mutat res. This is a thermal, an ecological and a historical principle: energy
inexorably flows but matter has qualitative substance and states. Otherwise it
would not change. Stated in its most radical form: we now have an ontologi-
cal basis for the consilience of sociology and the physical sciences. Only a
beginning, we grant, a tiny step, but one which humanism has ruled out for
centuries. Differently put, we are not subject to the laws of onto-theo-logic
creation nor to the creation ex nihilo and without limit beloved of post-theistic
humanism but to the physical laws of emergence. Crucially, this both includes
and founds human creativity.
In this reading, then, ontology is identified with the history of auto-eco-
organisation, or more simply, with emergence. That is necessarily path depen-
dent and therefore has not simply an open future but one consistent with
deterministic chaos: a finite but not entirely predictable space of possibilities.
We shall shortly see how Morin and Kauffman address this matter.
What are the sociological implications of Prigogine’s ontology self-emergence;
for us, of auto-eco-emergence?
Determinstic chaos must replace the idiomatic reliance of sociology and
humanistic philosophy on a notion of the arbitrary that can only exist in
verbal representation. Cognates are, conventionality in the strict sense – could
have been otherwise – the cultural arbitrary, (in Bourdieu’s sense), social
construction in the sense of a distinct, or ecologically unlimited, or sui generic
phenomena (in Durkheim’s sense). Or instead, the idea that the human-social
(really) begins with a blank slate which can be ‘authored’ (in Geertz’s sense)
which only human power obscures; discursive determination, as though dis-
course knows no limit other than custom. A rather more persuasive concept
of human power and significance comes from evolutionary psychology (see
Alexander 1989, 1990, cited also in Burgess & Macdonald (eds) 2005: 88).
Humans have become so ecologically dominant that the major threat to any
human is other humans, both taken collectively. More of that below. Suffice
to say that the political ethics of interaction and opposition have a basis in
ontology rather than the cultural arbitrary.
Prigogine’s most useful, generic term in this respect is a dissipative system:
Dissipative systems are thermodynamically open. They are capable of
assimilating large reserves of environmental energy and converting them
into increasing structural complexity. The process … is irreversible … the
system cannot return to its original state. Because of this irreversible
increase in internal complexity, dissipative systems possess an evolu-
tionary capacity which allows them to fend off thermal equilibrium.
When speaking of these capacities, scientists refer to the ability of dis-
sipative systems to transfer their positive entropy (i.e. the build-up of
internally generated disorder) to their immediate surroundings at a faster
rate than they produced them … Hence the name ‘dissipative structures’.
(Reed and Harvey 1992: 362)
Note the date of this quote and limited progress in a mainstream sociology
still dominated by the illusory political freedoms of post-structuralism. The
crucial issue here is the ability and tendency of open systems to both maintain
and evolve themselves and/by transferring disorder to their surroundings. We
are here beginning to approach the subject matter of later chapters. Let us
simply note at this point that ‘modification’ whether abiotic, or biotic, or
socio-biotic involves this kind of transfer, pollution, excretion, waste, all as
unintended consequences of this order-disorder ecology. Is it conceptually
sufficient or habitually lax to think of pollutants, or more robustly, shit, as
outcomes of a blank slate, the cultural arbitrary, as simply social constructions?
In case the point is lost, such ‘by-products’ are necessary ontological conditions;
by comparison, social construction is no ontology at all. Socio-biological
construction, however, is a wholly different matter.
Heat energy and thermodynamics are Prigogine’s field. We are, however,
beginning to topicalise a much broader concept of resource dependency so far
as we approach the biotic and the socio-biotic. However, this should not be
understood as a simple materialism: the ecology of perceptions, under-
standings, representations, signification or ‘structural coupling of organism
and environment’ remains central to our enterprise.
Morin: restricted and general complexity

Morin considers the matter from a subtly different point of view. He distin-
guishes between restricted and general complexity. Whilst unintended, some
of Prigogine’s presentation of thermal energy as the agent of change coincides
to a degree with restricted complexity on the grounds that it is clearly, cau-
sally directional. Morin’s general complexity has more to do with the ecology
of mutual, or multiple, causal relationships.
First let us map the common ground between Prigogine and Morin. Morin
(2006: 1) offers three reasons why ‘classical science’ rejects or ignores
complexity:
1 ‘The principle [if not the fact] of universal determinism.’ ‘Sufficient’ past
knowledge enables future prediction.
2 The necessity of reduction: the whole must be explained by its constituent
parts.
3 Disjunction: the separation of distinct disciplines.
(derived from Morin 2006: 1, with much abbreviation)
Having noted that complexity in the Latin means ‘bound together’ and that
disciplinary distinctness operates so as to obscure that, he points to several
crucial points that, so to speak, refuse to be contained by the ‘classical’
worldview. The first of these is irreversibility; in particular the irrevocable
increase in entropy and disorder. We have dealt with that sufficiently (for the
moment) above. Here we simply underline that order here means self-emergent
order and disorder implies its decay. That would apply equally to the sun, the
solar system, the living.
Second – and implied in the first – is the strong relation, or better, the
dynamic indissolubility of emergent organisation and disorder. Like us, he is
at pains to distinguish this from theo-centric creation (ibid. 3).
These are, in our view, broadly in agreement with Prigogine. The third ele-
ment – chaos – we suggest (whatever Morin’s intentions) is not – and is
inconsistent with himself. Consider this: ‘We are in fact, since the original
deflagration and forever, plunged in a chaotic universe’ (ibid.). This is unac-
ceptable in both common sense and analytic terms. Once again, we are, or we
should be, speaking of deterministic chaos. The universe or the world may be
far-from-equilibrium but it is still subject to the laws of its own ‘instability’.
Morin retrieves his position later but the contradiction remains.
Contrast Prigogine:
Matter acquires new properties when far-from-equilibrium in that fluc-

tuations and instabilities become the norm. Matter becomes more
‘active’.
(ibid. 64, our emphases)
A body of water driven far-from-equilibrium will not leave behind its char-
acter and assume another one: water vapour is still water and still exhibits its
molecular characteristics albeit in ‘accelerated’ form. The chaos surrounding
a road accident will still consist of vehicles and persons, however injured or
modified. The evolution of a new species will bear a non-trivial, non-chaotic
relation to the ancestor that is an insufficient condition for its emergence but
certainly a necessary one. The re-use or evolution of a social institution will
still bear characteristic relations to its actualised past in shaping and the
landscape of future possibilities. More formally put, determinate chaos is
subject to a landscape of attractors of varying degrees of influence, possibility
and impossibility. We must be careful not to replace the determinacy of
classical mechanics with simple indeterminacy.
On the subject of general complexity – where mutuality makes the direction
of cause ambivalent – Morin is on much stronger ground. This, to use his
own term, is a thoroughly auto-eco-organisational field. Here there can be no
question of simple or formal indeterminacy. The landscape of interactive
possibility and impossibility is entirely qualitative. ‘Matter’ is certainly active,
mutually so. We offer two strikingly different examples: food chains and
transport systems. Both require truly specific forms of energy transfer; both
occur in a landscape of affordances; both are causally reciprocal on that
landscape. The former appears to evolve more slowly, the latter – in its con-
temporary forms – very quickly. Characteristically, this rate of change may be
taken to be human agency but could equally well be taken (in Prigogine’s
sense) as energetic acceleration, not unlike temperature as a measure of
molecule velocity in (say) gases. Post-humanism again.
Morin puts the matter as follows:
Since a paradigm of simplification controls classical science by imposing

a principle of reduction and a principle of disjunction to any knowledge,
there should be a paradigm of complexity that would impose a principle
of distinction and a principle of conjunction … Thus the principle of
reduction is substituted by a principle that conceives the relation of
whole-part mutual implication.
(Morin 2006: 6, our emphases)
We take the point – and agree – but imposition and substitution look a little too
much like a general imperative: an idiom. Again the fuzzy recourse: imposition
and substitution to a degree; where the apparent, the ‘evidence’ seems to
require it. This underlines a level of complicity with both pragmatism and
scientific-empirical methodology that would be firmly outside post-structuralism
and by definition excluded from formal critical philosophy.
The point can be taken differently: how far is a deep ecology (in Capra’s
sense) necessary or even possible? One is tempted to say: hardly at all. After
all, this is far too close to Laplace’s demon7 that would need to know not
only every past actualisation but every future possibility. That is not cogni-
tion, certainly not the kind of cognition that biosemiotics attributes to the
biosphere, including us (more of that in due course). The issue is again prag-
matic, a question of sufficiency; and there lies the central axiom: truth is not
finally decided by method but by temporal outcome.8 Ontologies, paradigms,
methodology are part of the emergence of the ‘evident’ – or what Heidegger
more poetically might term ‘unconcealedness’. We admit to a certain irony or
even misuse here. Heidegger’s view is that representational thinking – prag-
matism – serves to conceal the ‘self-showing’ of Being. We are not in that
ontological space and certainly not in the political space of disastrous
mundane negligence it both implies and provoked.9
For us, despite Heidegger’s essayed destruction of western metaphysics, that
is simply a more modern form of the standpoint of irony. Crucially it leaves
work and political action to others whether in ancient Athens or Nazi Germany.
And yes, reciprocally, complexity theory embraces pragmatism, an empiricism
qualified by (far-from-equilibrium) dynamics, an intellectual politics.
The most subtle and arguably the most important argument Morin advances
follows from this. He argues that the familiar position – the whole is more than
the sum of its parts because of emergent properties – is not quite enough:
… the whole is not only more than the sum of its parts but also less …
Because a certain number of qualities and properties present in the parts
can be inhibited in the whole …
Thus, the notion of organisation becomes capital, since it is through
organisation of parts in a whole that emergent qualities appear and
inhibited qualities disappear.
(ibid. 7–8)
We are clearly in the midst of what Morin here calls self-eco-organisation

or elsewhere, as we prefer: auto-eco-organisation. Morin clearly intends this
to apply to the living and the grounds for the emergence of the living are
clear. We simply need replicative information. We shall return to this in the
postscript to this chapter. However, whilst we will argue that the non-living
(in the sense of physical phenomena) or those associated with the living
(ecosystems, societies, markets) are not strictly autopoietic in Maturana and
Varela’s sense – (that is self-replicating) every instance of emergence-inhibition
is necessarily auto-eco-organisational so far as it is qualitatively patterned. In
other words, the non-part-living is also informed by its own properties. We
return to this important idea below.
Meanwhile, we suggest that Morin has added to (our reading of) Prigo-
gine’s ontology as the history of auto-eco-organisation, an explicit emphasis
on the proposition that a newly emergent set of ontological conditions may
inhibit or modify previous conditions by multi-directional causality.
Kauffmann and ‘the next adjacent possible’

The third contributor to our synthesis is Kauffmann. Again the emphases are
different. First, he points out that emergence is beyond reductionism (Kauffmann
2008, opening chapters) and is therefore fundamentally unpredictable:
If the biosphere and the global economy are examples of co-constructing

wholes, and at the same time, parts of these processes are not sufficiently
described by natural law … the biosphere literally constructs itself and
evolves … and remains a coherent whole even as it diversifies … even as
extinctions events occur … we [are] far beyond reductionism indeed.
(Kauffmann 2008: 6)
And
We live in a different universe from that envisioned by reductionism. This
book describes a scientific worldview that embraces the reality of
emergence.
(2008: 5 our emphasis)
It is essential to see exactly what ‘natural law’ means here. It is fundamentally

‘a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process’ (ibid.). It
cannot be surprising, then, that actual emergence ‘violates’ such laws. Or
rather, it is the wrong way to word it: the description does not prescribe nor
exhaust all future possibilities. Another related idea is that complexity is not
reducible or ‘compressible’ in advance by or to a simplified formula.10
Kauffmann regularly discusses thermodynamics but (to our knowledge)
only marginally engages Prigogine. The latter, of course, would argue that (at
least) the first and second laws of thermodynamics are actually inviolable and
indeed that this makes possible both the emergence and the dissolution of
order. The former is not explicit on this. He speaks instead of free energy and
‘order for free’ and this for many practical purposes ‘solves’ the issue. As we
put it above: heat flows. Instead, ‘creative’ emergence is his emphasis. Ours,
and we suggest Prigogine’s also, would be complex, driven, or ‘created’
auto-eco-emergence.
Put more formally, he considers the behaviour of collectively auto-catalytic
sets in exploring the space of the next ‘adjacent possible’:
[W]hen the diversity of molecules is high enough and the ratio of reac-
tions to molecules is high enough, it becomes expected that each mole-
cule has at least one reaction leading to its formation catalysed by at least
one member of the reaction system. At this point the emergence of
collectively autocatalytic systems becomes a near certainty.
(ibid. 60–64)
Whilst the precise details are difficult to understand for non-specialists

(including ourselves) the general direction is reasonably clear. As diversity
increases, so does reaction, including catalysis: ‘new’ outcomes become ever
more likely. So that even if the original conditions for life on earth were
scattered, or unlikely, the processes of reaction increase their own likelihood.
The biosphere has exploded into its chemical adjacent possible. We will
find similar explosions in economics, human history and elsewhere.
(ibid. 64)
We therefore have a clear parallel: where Prigogine speaks of systems far-

from-thermal-equilibrium, Kauffmann identifies systems far-from-chemical-
equilibrium. In each case what we (as non-specialists) need to understand is
that the door to evolution – the next adjacent possible – is both open and/but
path dependent. Whilst the description is formal, the actual processes are
necessarily qualitative and mutually causal. Differently put, both self-emergence
and constraint apply: auto-eco-organisation.
Consider this emphasis:
[A]s mutations occur so novel proteins are made, or new organic mole-
cules are synthesised in evolution, the biosphere is persistently advancing
into its next adjacent possible …
The same uniqueness occurs at the level of the evolution of species, the
human economy, of human history and human culture. To put the matter
simply: we will never explore all the possibilities. History enters when the
space of the possible is vastly larger than the space of the actual. At these
levels, the evolution of the universe is vastly non-repeating, hence vastly
non-ergodic.
(Kauffman 2008: 123, original emphases)
Again the identity of ontology and the history of emergence but again the
two-edged perception: deterministic chaos, deterministic history. Both are
perfectly compatible with, indeed identical with, uniqueness. It is the char-
acter of systems far-from-equilibrium that makes this possible. And con-
versely, the idea that determinacy involves persistence, rigidity, predictability
is only the case at equilibrium. Of course there are areas of equilibrium – the
converse is not a dogma – including the final postulated equilibrium of heat
death.
One final point should be stressed: the evolution of the universe is vastly
non-repeating, hence vastly non-ergodic (op. cit). This wording dramatically
underscores what we mean by the identity of ontology with the history of
emergence. One path of emergence has been pursued, but is incomplete. This
is the sense in which ontology must coincide with history.
Per Bak: self-organised criticality

Self-organised criticality can be understood as the emergence of ‘global’, that
is, a macro-state organisation that is caused by the ‘action’ or influence of
individuals or particles at a micro-level. The convolution of the wording here
is the consequence of mutual causality and that what counts as micro – the
individual or particle – and what counts as global or macro is somewhat
undecidable. For example, a market and its price fluctuations may be regar-
ded as a system exhibiting self-criticality on account of the individual choices
of buyers and sellers. How far they can be regarded as individuals – as
opposed to, say, members – and how far the market is a truly ‘global’ unit,
remains in question. For ecological economics markets are clearly subsystems
of terrestrial resource systems, (Costanza et al. 2015) which in turn are
dependent on energy solar storage and use. But at the very least markets are
undeniably macro-phenomena:
… complex behaviour in nature reflects the tendency of large systems
with many components to evolve into a poised, ‘critical’ state, way out of
balance, where minor disturbances may lead to events, called avalanches,
of all sizes. Most of the changes take place through catastrophic events
rather than by following a smooth gradual path. The evolution to this
very delicate state occurs without design from any outside agent. The
state is established solely because of the dynamical interactions amongst
individual elements of the system: the critical state is self-organised. Self-
organised criticality is so far the only known general mechanism to
generate complexity.
(Bak 1996, Chapter 1, location 128–132. Kindle Edition)
One of the simplest examples of self-organised criticality Bak analyses is a

sandpile – in his case a virtual one. We prefer the ‘actual’ one but that too, of
course, is an abstraction. The gradual addition of ‘grains’ of sand causes
generally patterned but individually unpredictable avalanches at the macro-
level. These outcomes are taken as independent of individual (micro) causes
so far as the ‘pile’ exhibits system-level coherence:
The avalanches form a dynamic of their own, which can be understood

only from a holistic description of the properties of the entire pile rather
than from a reductionist description of individual grains: the sandpile is a
complex system.
(Bak 1996, Chapter 1, location 137–138. Kindle Edition)
We do not want to put words into Bak’s mouth but we do want to question
the detail of this wording. Our modification, closely allied to Morin’s mutual
causality, runs as follows. The ‘entire’ pile operates as a ‘global’ emergent
entity – no one wishes to deny that. But a holistic description, for our under-
standing, stresses the relationship between the micro components and the
macro-outcomes. This is, despite the anti-reductionist imperative, a strictly
one-directional causal relationship. It is an ‘additive’ or aggregate process at
the grain level that promotes the far greater avalanche outcomes at the ‘pile’
level. Differently put, aggregation changes the subsequent history and land-
scape of possibility. Moreover, this occurs through qualitative properties at
the micro-level. For example, ball bearings would not aggregate nor ava-
lanche in the same way. Water droplets would not pile at all. Consequently,
the possibility of mutual causality is itself a qualitative outcome of aggre-
gation or, better, interaction. More radically, mutual causality is itself a
temporally-emergent property of the qualitative influence of interactive
components.
Note our earlier point: This is a thermal, an ecological and a historical
principle: here energy inexorably flows but matter has qualitative substance
and states. Otherwise it would not change. This time the local energy is actually
kinetic, whatever the original energetic source.
We can reconsider this from the point of view of fuzzy logic to generate
perhaps a more elegant formulation. We referred above to the undecidability
of micro-macro relations and therefore of the direction(s) of mutual causality.
They are best understood, we suggest, again as matters of degree: the one
shades into the other. They are also path dependent, which makes the origin,
the grain, the established order, somewhat determinant for the ‘new’ landscape
of possibility. Understood in this sense, path dependency, or from the alter-
native standpoint ‘the next adjacent possible’ are necessarily fuzzy principles:
degrees of actual and emergent possibility.
How far does this contradict or confirm Morin’s mutual or circular causality?
One of his key ideas is that the causal process can be, so to speak, reversed.
His term is ‘inhibition’ (see above). In other words, the agency of the whole med-
iates or controls the agency of the parts. It is crucial that this is not under-
stood formally but qualitatively. The inhibition of the cell in the body is
utterly unlike the inhibition of the grain in the sandpile. A level of determinacy
still applies: the quality of the part-whole relationship will ‘secure’ the outcome.
However, this formulation implies an ‘independent’ driving force acting on
materially specific phenomena. Outcomes are then both specific, that is, informed
(in the sense of having form) and energised. We shall return to this below.
Bak (1996) asserts, ‘Complexity is a consequence of criticality.’ We agree
but with reservations. Criticality is not the origin but rather the outcome of
energetic processes on informed matter. This is Prigogine’s position: matter
becomes ‘active’ when far from energetic equilibrium. Differently put, ener-
getic re-direction and re-information must be an inherent possibility in the
material phenomena concerned. Or better, re-information is about the macro-
level interaction between ‘particles’, molecules, individuals. Understood at a
more global level this is energised interaction between ‘systems’: energised
auto-eco-organisation.
Conclusions and implications

Prigogine provides, in our view, the most complete ontology for two reasons.
1. The ‘active’ onto-theology of creation is instead driven by a new loca-
lised universal: energy. In Prigogine this is primarily in the form of heat. Other
candidates such as light, geothermal, kinetic, chemical, may in due course
more fully describe emergence. Here Kauffman’s autocatalysis is particularly
relevant. The more general imperative is an ontology that places energy at the
centre of emergence and reciprocally, critiques – or better, leaves behind –
onto-theology in its active forms (God creates), its inactive forms (God is dead)
and its mutant forms: humanism, homocentrism, glottocentrism, discursive
emergence. This is an extreme challenge given that not only certain idioms (as
we discuss above) are shaped by onto-theology but also by our very language.
2. That very language suggests and habitually formalises phenomena by
treating them as unproblematic members of a certain category. This is itself
an extreme example of categorical collection. Prigogine’s decisive insight is
that emergence is not formal, not categorical, but qualitative. This is expres-
sed in the form of matter becoming ‘active’ in systems far-from-thermal-
equilibrium. The most important consequence of this concept is the complete
change in our understanding of possibility. The abstract notion of formal
possibility and random probability is thus entirely replaced by deterministic
chaos, path dependency, the next adjacent possible, the actually not-possible.
Morin adds to this with his distinction between restricted and general
complexity. Where the former displays the conventional temporal form of
cause-effect, the latter displays mutual causal processes. The key conclusion is
that causality is itself a qualitative outcome of interaction not an independent
entity, certainly not a one-directional entity. The implications of modelling
qualitatively distinguishable but mutually causal systems are enormous, not
least in the socio-political arena: how can concepts such as power, authority
and sovereignty resist serious reconceptualisation in this scenario?
Self-organised criticality presents a complementary picture in which (for
our analysis) the direction of causality is potentially in question. We – as
opposed to Morin who stresses the ‘global’ – stress the necessity and import of a
micro-macro relationship. It is this relation that engenders the next adjacent
landscape of possibility. Kauffman’s auto-catalysis presents parallel phenom-
ena, whilst his metaphor is ‘explosion’ rather than avalanche. Whether we are
speaking of auto-catalysis or aggregation there is simply no point in focusing
on the single agent, however striking its qualitative characteristics because
they can only be expressed at the macro-level. ‘Macro’ is therefore both
emergent and fuzzy, a question of degree. That is our version of deep, and
shallow, ecology.
Throughout the paper we have proposed the need for fuzzy logic: that the
idea that something is true to a degree, and in particular belongs to a set
(such as social phenomena or the working class) to a certain degree. This is
primarily because systems cannot be simply isolated from one another.
Morin’s argument is clear here. It is only on the basis of ‘classical’ stabilities
that phenomena can be ‘safely’ carved up into discrete units, each with their
‘own’ discipline. Complexity theory is inevitably an ecological paradigm and
therefore both fuzzy and multi-disciplinary. We admit that this incipient
‘democratisation’ whilst claiming on the one hand to be more rigorous also
threatens to set free the most radical forms of pluralism – and not just the
polite, liberal-leftish ones.
We are back to that old question: what is the evidence? That is our mutual
limitation. However, the idiom of the standpoint of irony no longer truly
applies; or, if so, only to a degree.
Finally, what we present here is primarily an ontology of auto-eco-
emergence. That is a first step. What we need next is an ontology of auto-
eco-persistence and then of eco-evolution. Neo-Darwinism and ecological
theory provide the foundations for a consideration of these later stages. But
both presuppose – and do not deliver – a ‘first’ ontology of emergence. This
could be ‘explained’ but not adequately defended on the basis of the
traditional hierarchy of ‘first’ and ‘second’ sciences: physics (Prigogine),
chemistry (Kauffmann) and biology. But as Morin’s argument on mutual
causality clearly indicates, that temporal division is insupportable. The ‘late’
sciences, especially ecological sociology and ecological economics, must treat
firstness as part of their own analytic and disciplinary responsibilities, not
least in the controversy of sustainability.
‘Firstness’ also means that the late sciences – the disciplines of the mediate –
must also concede the centrality of energy, a dimension routinely ignored.
Available energy, whether solar, thermal, chemical, electrical, kinetic, nuclear
is the basis for a renewed realism, or better, materialism, insofar as it drives the
dynamic emergence of new order(s) or the persistence of equilibria. Materi-
alism, because energy acts upon qualitative matter, such that it shapes and
expresses itself in a relational manner at macro-ecological levels. That exchange
‘matters’ to every discipline and cannot be safely left to physics. Differently
put, the post-humanist challenge must also be met by the human sciences.
We are now in a position to begin to address Heidegger’s concern about the
reduction of ontology to epistemology. Material presence – brute firstness in
Pierce’s sense; then the secondary ability of organisms and arguably also
technologies, that is autopoetic and allopoietic entities to be sensitive to
firstness; then the thirdness of informational and conceptual outputs, repre-
sentations of every kind, is the mapping we must explore. In so doing – first,
second, third – must not be reduced to directional causality despite the evidence
of temporal sequence. Reciprocal causality is instead implied. Grains begin
but do not explain the pile. The last organism is no less an ecological element
than the first. The representation is in no way the decaying of presence but
rather its modification as ontologies for the embodied or constructed phe-
nomena. Human culture, for good or ill, including its ontologies, is now fun-
damentally part of terrestrial ecology. Auto-eco-organisation must then be
accompanied by auto-exo-reference. Again this is Morin’s (2002) term.
In this sense, both one directional and mutual causality are insufficient
descriptions. It is important to see, as Prigogine insists, that temporal-causal
relations are absolute. They cannot be reversed. How then is mutual or
‘upward’ causality possible? Because a new causal landscape has superseded the
former possible to become the next adjacent possible. A new set of qualitative
causal relationships have emerged.
Postscript and transition: an informational turn

Bohm (1993) distinguishes between active and passive information:
[W]e are calling attention to the literal meaning of the word, i.e. to in-form,
which is to actively put form into something …
The sound energy we hear in the radio does not come directly from the
radio wave itself which is too weak to be detected by our sense. It comes
from the power … an essentially unformed energy that can be given form
(i.e. in-formed) by the pattern carried by the wave … The information in
the radio wave is potentially active everywhere, but is actually active only
when and where it can give form to the electrical energy which, in this
case, is in the radio.
(Bohm and Hiley 1993: 35–6)
Recall Prigogine’s position: that energy flows and also changes things. Our
rider was that this process is mutually interactive: energy acts on qualitatively-
informed matter and in turn generates changes that the interaction ‘allows’.
This is auto-eco-organisation. In Bohm’s formulation the subtle difference is
that patterned information exists but requires energy to ‘substantiate’ it.
Much the same argument can be made about the living. A pattern exists
genetically – for example a seed – but is only the potential for the plant which
would require photosynthetic energy on available physical compounds to
become autopoietic. This is auto-eco-poiesis. The plant is now part of the
ecological conditions for the ‘next adjacent possible’. This does not so much
suggest the mutual inter-changeability of energy and information as their
confluence in establishing matter. This is exactly the kind of materialism we
discussed above.
Bohm continues:
[T]he information held by human beings [and every organism in our view]
is in general active rather than passive, not merely reflecting something
outside itself but active, or at least potentially capable of participating in
the thing [the environment] to which it refers. Passive information may in
fact be the limiting case in which we abstract from the activity of infor-
mation. This is essentially the kind of information that is currently used
in information theory, e.g. as used by Shannon.
(ibid. 36–7, our additions)
The dismissive limitation of information theory is this passage is striking:

‘valid in certain limited circumstances’ (ibid.) and suggests that we may be
missing the point! More of that in due course. To conclude this section, we
suggest a modification is needed. We are not simply speaking of thermal
(dis)equilibria in Prigogine’s sense but following the remarks above, also of
informational (dis)equilibria.
Notes
1 Dreyfus (1991) has a somewhat different reading.
2 Topicalised later as information reception and rejection. This must be seen as
active decision-making about what counts as noise/information.
3 The degree – trivial or essential – of connectedness is an instance of pragmatic
noise/information distinction.
4 For an alternative description see Smith and Jenks 2006.
5 This issue has been differently pursued, for example by Pinker, Ridley, Wilson and
more generally by Evolutionary Psychology.
6 Swenson, R. and Turvey, M. (1991).
7 Laplace’s ‘demon’ is a beast of such intelligence that it can map both the actual
and possible universe(s). For a discussion of its impossibility see Smith & Jenks
(2006: 123–8).
8 This will recur. What is ‘true’ in the sense of actually there and in the sense of a
sufficient ‘description’ or perception is primarily a matter of ecologically persistent
outcomes.
9 See Rosen, S. (2000).
10 For example, the multiples of (say) 6 can be mapped by 6 x N but a set of prime
numbers cannot. They are emergent; they ‘announce themselves’.
2 The strengths and limitations of the
concept of social construction
Social construction is real and undeniable. The problem is misplaced reduc-

tion: social construction as based on an economic foundation, as realised in
cultures, as realised in gender or ethnic inequalities, as primarily discursive.
Social construction rests in all of these and more: the physical environment,
the biosphere, perceptual and informational systems, resource availability,
disciplines of inquiry, political habits, belief systems. Nor does it belong to the
‘progressive’ left. It is just as much at home in radical nationalism or religious
fundamentalism, though its clothing will differ. Hitler was as much a social
constructionist as Foucault. Neoliberal economics is as much a construct as
its Marxist or ecological variants. And there we meet the temptation of irony:
then they are all equal; equally worthless. No they are not. They differ
markedly, as any fool can see. All right then: they are equally valid. No they
are not. Validity is not an abstraction. It depends on outcomes and effects. It
connotes both value and truth, to some community. We are tempted to define
that community as the biosphere, including ourselves. For the moment let us
say that ‘equal’ validity is self-evidently misplaced formalism again; an out-
worn idiom. Validity is open to real scrutiny, not closed by abstract equality.
Differently put, there is no in principle equality between Nazism and
Democracy, except by ignoring the difference. This is the standpoint of irony.
It is instructive that Heidegger failed to interrogate the difference. Socrates
was no better: life or hemlock? What’s the difference? That sort of martyr-
dom, whether self-elected or forced on others, is the unacceptable limit of the
ignorance of the standpoint of irony.
We must remember that such collective reductions as ‘social construction’
are not only possible but characteristic of verbal representations. Whether we
call it irony, practised ignorance, or misplaced formalism, the essential pro-
blem lies in the category: social construction. It is an aural illusion that any
homogeneity is granted by that col-lection, understood in its profound ety-
mological sense: bringing together with speech. It may reflect the very econ-
omy of human conceptualisation but it is not without cost or immune from
misuse. Therefore we should take most seriously the fuzzy maxim: objects and
phenomena only belong to ‘their’ set or category to a certain degree. Perhaps
it would be more verbally prudent to think of social construction as the more
modest category of ecologically-emergent outcomes in which (human) social
agency is co-implicated.
That should be absolutely distinguished from, for example, Foucault:
What, in short, we wish to do is dispense with ‘things’. To depresentify

them … to substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to
discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.
(Foucault 1972: 47–8)
Or: in the beginning was the word.

The similarity is anything but accidental. It is perfectly true that ‘objects’ in
the definitional sense are indeed and inevitably formed – defined – in dis-
course. This is simply a tautology: things get defined, come to be, differ-
entiated ‘discursively’. How could it be otherwise for humans? But the
tautology has a profound echo that satirises and mocks the circularity. It
could be otherwise for not-humans. It could be otherwise for humans who are
not merely speakers. And as the utmost irony, it is denied in the agile wisdom
of language itself. Objects are things, etymology tells us, thrown up against the
senses. It is one thing to say that both positions are compatible: that object is
both independently real and emerges in discourse. But it is far more radical to
note that language insists on this duality in the face of monadic philosophical
and monotheist religious idioms and that the latter are by this token, mistaken.
In this sense, language is less glottocentric than the discursivity of Foucault or
the textualism of Derrida. Language insists that objects emerge in discourse
to a degree. There are, then, different dimensions of emergence other than
discourse or even ‘social construction’ in its most critical realist guise.
More radical still, this is because, we argue, language has an older and
greater history than that granted by the theists and (post-theist) philosophers
and a deeper more fundamental relationship to the biosphere. Language has
become part of ontology, not because of monist philosophy or monotheistic
religions but because it belongs to the possibility of the living, like the senses
and the signs and frugally named ‘informatics’ of biosemiotics. Language
understood in this sense is part of the history of emergence of kinds of
knowing that belong to the relationships between organisms and environments.
This is post-humanism, or indeed, pre-humanism. This is to understand the
human and language as an ecological possibility; to understand language as
recognising and living intimately with forms of signification other than itself.
Given our analysis in the first chapter this ecological status of human lan-
guage and the bio-semiosphere carries with it – at least potentially – the caution
of self-limitation and imagined alternatives to what seems securely present.
Prey-predator relations, for example, display this at both conscious and, cri-
tically, at preconscious and prelinguistic levels: the alertness of the deer, the
instinct of the hunting cat to conceal itself, the camouflage of insects. What is
displayed here is not the idiomatic caution of philosophers – Kant’s ‘could
The concept of social construction 33
have been otherwise’ – or of the critical phenomenology of systemic ‘putting
in doubt’ – but the co-evolution of organisms and environments.
There is another ontological error that we must address, however. As we
shall see they too are intimately connected. Citing Hacking (2000: 7) and de
Beauvoir’s (1997: 295) well-known claim that ‘one is not born but rather
becomes a woman’, Elder-Vass (2012: 7) argues:
[O]ne of the most significant implications of any claim that something is

socially constructed is that it could be constructed differently [original
emphasis]. It would be possible for us collectively to think differently and
this would make the constructions that depend on this thinking different
in themselves.
(our emphasis)
The example immediately preceding this passage is money: ‘if we stopped

believing that it had exchange value, then money as such would cease to exist.
There might still be [non-functional] banknotes … credit cards …’ (ibid.). The
reasoning seems natural, even instinctive. And it is: precaution and provi-
sionality are central to the exercise of intelligence. But that conceals both a
logical and a paradigmatic error.
The logical, or if you prefer, semantic error consists in erasing the specifics
in the name, so to speak, of the category. Money is an obvious example of a
highly contingent or conventional construct. The granting of a credit limit on
a card, even more so. The sub-prime crisis is a case in point. Many currencies
have ceased to exist as currency. But some have not. Beauvoir is less convin-
cing. We would have to argue that one is both born and becomes a woman.
Much the same could be said of a man, or indeed, a cat. The problem lies in
the persistence in the face of reconstructions: worthless coinage, biological
sexuality, being ‘of a species’. Instead of these vital eco-emergent, persistent
characteristics, Elder-Vass has the lifeless, functionless, purposeless, non-specific
‘something that is socially constructed’. As soon as you ask the question why
the currency became worthless when others did not, or why we routinely take
the female gender to be more constructed (apparently) than the male, the
illusion of similarity disappears. We have to begin to find plausible reasons for
the specifics. It is easy to see that blanket statements that ‘x could have been
otherwise’ are identical with the totalising standpoint of irony, in which x
idiomatically has no significance. But plausible ‘reasoning’ about specifics is
central to survival. The non-human biosphere, of course, accomplishes that
without verbal reasoning. It still exercises ‘judgement’ about species specific
‘representations’ of an environment.
The paradigmatic error is also present in the foregoing but should be made
explicit. What appears to be the case – x – cannot be discounted because
however much we imagine or even want it to be otherwise it is part of the history
of ontological emergence. This is why the worthless coinage still has, if not
value, then signification. This why the Earth, according to the scale, is both
flat and spherical. This is why, according to speed, time is both absolute and
relative. Discounting appearance, then, is not within the remit of specific
human agency (for example a philosopher or school of sociology) because
appearance was not simply a matter of specific human agency in the first
place. Appearance rightly claims that we attend to it, not ignore it. The
standpoint of irony is completely inappropriate.
Taken further, another multi-dimensional example is social inequality. It is
politically and publicly almost impossible to support it. Much well-intentioned
investment and bitter struggle has been aimed at reducing it but again and
again, inequality reappears, ironically as healthy as ever, intended or not. What
a Durkheimian thought! Then it becomes clear that ‘constructing differently’
is no more than mistaking auto-eco-emergence for human construction,
humanism revisited. An ontology of complex emergence instead insists on
multiple agency and therefore humanly-unintended outcomes. This is no more
than an identical proposition to determinate chaos and implies, again, the
potential exploration of the next adjacent possible. The simpler forms of
constructionism that embrace ‘could have been otherwise’, then, un- or sub-
consciously propose a theory of merely chaotic possibility in which random
‘events’ have no immediate nor historic significance. That is the standpoint of
irony. It is essentially an idiom of ostensible engagement based on a sub-
merged theory of chaotic non-being. It has nothing to do or say about ‘pre-
sence’, whether compelling or plainly incredible. Hence the hemlock. Note
that Socrates, despite reasoning that he could not choose between the value of
living or dying, nevertheless opted to commit suicide. The standpoint of irony
is expressed as suicide, or less dramatically as self-effacement. This is no
viable model of critical reasoning, despite its traditional credibility.
We must argue, then, that anything that has form, or in the language of the
first chapter, ‘is informed’, has the potential to enter as an agent in auto-eco-
organisation. To insist that this must be understood locally and qualitatively is
to stand outside the idiomatic habits of unsupportable categorisation. We must
remember – it seems a simple but ignored point – that sets and categories are
not equations and must be sharply differentiated from them. Differently put, a
set, even though its significance is specifically quality-dependent, is inevitably
also actively reductive of significant difference. Think of a set of red things,
including cars, apples, blood. Or: an ash tree is a tree but a tree is not an ash
tree; a man may be working class, but working class is not a man.
Unfortunately, pragmatic ignorance either as a philosophical position or as
everyday reasoning leads us to much the same place. ‘Social constructions’
are what people arrive at as ‘best guesses’ about their circumstances, never
mind the inevitable limitations. Conclusions, false or not, are about surviving;
possibly provisional, they are certainly imperative. And those ‘imperatives’
will probably involve differential power, forms of enforcement and exclusion.
Pragmatism and contestation go hand in hand.
The decisive difference offered by the founders of sociology is to locate
these processes in forms of solidarity. This means that the relationship
between social construction and power – the actual opportunity and means of
construction – are topicalised. Moreover, it proposes to shift the ontological
processes of social construction from self-consciousness to the practically-
active collective. This proposal is by no means resolved. It is not at all clear
how the collective ‘is’ conscious; nor is it clear whether consciousness, or
responsiveness in the broadest sense, is thinkable simply as something that
belongs to the human collective. Stated in its most radical form, this raises the
question: What do we mean by information? We refer the reader back to the
crucial distinction between active and passive information, being in-formed
and being informed about. Recall that anything that has qualitative form
therefore has auto-eco-organisational potential.
Marxism(s) and the economy

The primacy of social construction (though the name used is the more limited
concept of ideology) coincides with the emergence of large-scale industrial
production. This is arguably the common foundation of ‘sociologies’ and
social construction, given the ostensibly new dominance of human production
over previous natural limits. However, given our emphases in the previous
chapter, we want to highlight the role of the application of energy – the fossil
fuel, coal – and the development of steam-based technology to make viable
use of this resource. ‘Modernisms’ tend to emphasise the freedom of social
reconstruction this (might) make(s) possible. Nowhere is this refusal of limits
tested more radically than in the arts. But the idea of human emancipation is
frankly less plausible than the more efficient harnessing of power.
In this sense Marx is correct – to a degree – in proposing a form of eco-
nomic determinism: that cultural superstructure stands upon an economic
base. Ecological economics now sounds a more cautious note but for the
same reasons – our joint dependency on natural resources. However, the
development of ‘late’ or ‘post’ Marxism has led to less interest in the ‘given’
economic categories of class and more in the discursive complexities of power
or dispersed inequalities of gender, ethnicity, developmental stage, disability
and the like. Perhaps this too may be understood as an economically secured
‘new’ emphasis in late capitalism. Therefore, the pessimism of ecological
economics apart, it seems to be granted that the relationship between eco-
nomic ground and social construction has evolved, become more complex,
perhaps looser. In any case, the predicted course of historical materialism has
been radically challenged in the form of renewed nationalism, religious and
multi-gendered identities. Perhaps, then, this Marxist-realist or at least
economic account has been superseded in ‘post’-modernity.
Ortner (2006: 61–79) examines these notions suggesting that ‘class’ is both
a quasi-objective division and a matter of gendered or ethnic social con-
struction. However she reciprocally argues that the latter categories cannot
themselves be taken as given and, where they are, they tend to predominate:
‘These categories are always already part of an ethno-anthropology, and when
they are invoked in fieldwork, they make it almost impossible to bring other
dimensions of social difference into focus’ (ibid. 67). In suggesting, then, as
we did above, that economic determinism remains a legitimate concern – and
the same applies to race and gender – the point is to understand the dynamics
of their ecological co-determination, rather than the mutual obscuration that
comes from ‘radical’ perspectives. That option is there, we suggest, only as the
dogma of over-simplification.
A rather more controversial point follows. The multiple complexity of
social difference is clearly observed by ‘critical’ theory – that is, as a persistent
outcome of social dynamics. Ecologically speaking, such a pattern of dom-
ination appears robust, probable, even unavoidable. Yet this is exactly what
critical theory wants to circumvent. For the moment let us simply note this
collision between likely ontological outcomes and ethical preferences. It will
recur. From a post-humanist position this is an inevitable observation. And
again we note that there is no simple progressive/anti-progressive spectrum.
‘Reasoned’ discrimination and reasoned anti-discrimination are possible out-
comes. Whatever your stance, it is clear that post-humanist sociology must
accept the unfortunate reality that, for example, Islamic State and secularism,
neo-liberal and ecological economics, totalitarian and democratic regimes
competitively co-exist. Neither can be simply taken as pathological without yet
another commitment to practised ignorance. And the only totally viable form
of political ignorance is annihilation. More mundanely put, conflict follows,
even for, especially for, those committed to social tolerance and multi-culturalism
precisely because that is to exclude the alternatives. No party (especially we
Democrats) is prepared to accept mutually-assured conventionality.
For us, despite the dogmatic risk of determinism, Marxisms that stress
economic relations, that is, give proper credence to the agency of resources and
technologies, are the more ecological, viable perspectives. Dogmatic reflection
and determination, though, should admit to the plurality of cultural agency.
Conversely the prioritisation of verbally-articulated culture ‘floats’, so to speak,
answerable to nothing but itself, yet is constantly confounded by its own
deep-rooted differences. It is a strangely incredible phenomenon that admits
to no foundation and yet has compulsive roots. The answer is hidden in plain
sight: that formulation of culture is wrong. The paradox does not belong to
cultures themselves, ecologically understood, as co-implicated spheres of
agency.
Durkheim, organic solidarity and sui generic social phenomena

Durkheim is not usually thought of as an economic determinist. However, the
distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity remains ontologically
fundamental. In this sense ‘modern’, complex, industrial modes of production
and in particular the division of labour are the grounds of a new class of sui
generic social phenomena. We argue here and elsewhere1 that this is contra-
dictory. Social phenomena emerge in particular socio-economic-ecological
conditions. Durkheim is no less dependent on the advent of industrial capit-
alism than Marx. Differently put, social phenomena are tangled with resour-
ces, economic and technological phenomena, not least in the relation between
the co-emergence of competitively industrialised nation states in the nine-
teenth century. However if Marx’s analysis springs from his observation of the
British industrial revolution, Durkheim is equally ‘French’ in his particular
mixture of commitment to the moral requirement of a secular, complex
society, organic solidarity and republicanism.
In this sense Durkheim’s offer is double-edged: the concept of sui generic
social phenomena founds the very possibility of sociology – but at the price of
the isolation of social construction from other phenomena, notably psychological
and biological phenomena. It is important to understand how radical this
proposition is (or may be). If we accept Durkheim’s argument that these
phenomena ‘arise in different milieu’2 then we are not dealing with a biology or
a psychology operating in a social sphere – social psychology, socio-biology –
but social phenomena have constructed themselves, so to speak, so as to leave
those domains behind. Reductive explanations become impossible; even rela-
tionships become highly questionable. This is the ontological outcome of
social phenomena as sui generic. Differently put, the idea that human society arises
because we are biologically and psychologically social fades into the back-
ground as somehow ‘pre-social’. That is manifestly contradictory. Not only does it
potentially deny the difference between origin and development, between
being and becoming, but also the path of dependency and self-emergence that
it tries to promote. In its most radical form, then, it approaches the ahistorical,
quite contrary to the intentions that underscore, for example, Durkheim’s
conceptions of the normal and the pathological. Nowhere is this debate sharper
than in questions of the social construction of gender. Does social (re)construction
begin with a biologically, psychologically, even socially, blank slate? If so, this
is construction ex nihilo – and that is antithetical to ecological sociology.
The normal and the pathological

The distinction between the normal and the pathological, whilst ethically
disconcerting, is at first more ecologically promising since it offers both
historical and qualitative dimensions:
1 ‘… what is normal for a savage is not always for a civilised man, and vice
versa’ (Giddens 1972: 103).
2 ‘… a phenomenon can be defined as pathological only in relation to a
given type … We must abandon the still common habit of judging an
institution, a practice, or moral standard, in and by itself, for all social
types indiscriminately’ (ibid.).
Putting aside for a moment the imperialism of the language – savage and
civilised – as itself normal for the time, this is very much an ecological
formulation. The implication being that normalcy can be identified with the
more ecologically persistent, widespread and robust practices that emerge
from a social type. This is, of course, an ecological principle prioritised over
and above ‘local’ ethics and therefore sets loose all of the controversies we
discussed above. Robustness becomes normalcy, becomes the standard of the
true both epistemologically and ethically. However, contestation is part of
normalcy for the same reason: it has vitality. But the normal is the sphere of
contestation, not as the standpoint of irony presupposes: something that can
be ignored. This is exactly parallel to our earlier point: the apparent cannot be
discounted; it must be interrogated. It is truly strange that Socrates the suicide
still claims the centre stage in the name of reason. Perhaps he is compelling as
the limit of human imagination, but that is but a small part of a rich gift.
Some of the tangle that emerges can be seen in Durkheim’s reply to Tarde’s
criticisms: It is therefore socially normal that there should be psychologically
abnormal individuals in every society; and the normality of crime is only a
particular case of this general proposition (cited in Giddens 1972: 106). We take
it, then, that Durkheim concedes the variability of the normal, or to use our
terms: normality is a question of degree. Again this is consistent with ecological
robustness. However, it is arguably inconsistent with the simpler expressions
of social ‘facts’ and their independence from the individuals they constrain.
This, of course, is central to Durkheim’s ontology and methodology.
The only hint of socially ‘independent’ judgement occurs in this interesting
passage:
A phenomenon may persist … although no longer adapted to the

requirements of the [social] situation. It is then normal only in appear-
ance … illusory … habit[ual].
(ibid. 105)
Similar arguments abound in relation to current religious fundamentalisms

(in both the USA and the Middle East). But the targets of such criticisms can
easily refute them, for themselves, by reference to religious belief. Non-believers
remain in a reciprocal state of blank incomprehension or denial. Where
democracy was supposed to emerge, post-Saddam, post-Gaddafi, it was ethnic
and religious factionalism instead. Meanwhile creationism has returned, if it ever
left, to Europe and the USA. To say the least, there may be such judgements but
the utter absence of rational understanding is far more to the point. Is this to be
remedied or is sheer ignorance our irrevocable condition? Differently put, does
(post-humanist, ecological) sociology invite us to suspend membership? At what
price? This is the critical stance, suspension of belief, mise en abyme, deconstruc-
tion, taken beyond its customary good-mannered and leftish dress code. Is
our critical stance, then, a form of detached rationalism, quasi-scientific
(despite the obvious problems of actual, interested membership) – perhaps even
a sort of radicalised democracy of ideas? What, then, is other to this stance and
can we, must we, practise inclusion or exclusion? This brings us to Weber.
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For description of the Cercocystis-larva see Villot, Ann. Sci. Nat.

(Zool.) (6), xv. 1883, Art 4; and compare Leuckart's criticism of this
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[105]
Moniez, "Sur les Cysticerques," Paris, 1880; Id. "Sur les

Cestodes," 1881; Zschokke, "Recherches sur la structure
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For example, the genitalia in Dipylidium caninum are duplicated in

each proglottis. Other differences are noted in the following table
(pp. 89-90).
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See Stiles, Centralbl. f. Bakt. u. Parasitenkunde, 1893, xiii. p. 457

(conf. note, p. 90).
[109]
Taken from Neumann, Parasites of Domesticated Animals, 1892,

p. 448.
[110]
µ = 1⁄1000 millimetre.
[111]
For a description of these glands, and for further diagnostic details

and literature, see Stiles and Hassall, U. S. Department of
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Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Turbellarien, Griefswald, 1851.

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Arb. Inst. Würzburg, Bd. iii. 1876, p. 115.
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Ibid. Bd. iv. 1877, p. 305.
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Ann. Sci. Nat. (5) vol. xvii. 1873.
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Cf. Willey, Amphioxus and the Ancestry of the Vertebrates,

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Arch. Naturg. 60 Jahrg. Bd. i. 1894, p. 255.

[166]
SB. Ak. Berlin, 1891, p. 57.
[167]
[Hamann subsequently withdrew these statements.]
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Ibid. vol. xlii. 1885, p. 708.
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Macleay Memorial Volume, Sydney, 1893, p. 252; and Proc. Linn.

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4th edition, 1880.
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Bibl. Zool. Bd. ii. Heft 7. 1893.
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Jen. Zeitschr. Bd. xxv. 1891, p. 113.

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Zool. Anz. Bd. xv. 1892, p. 195.
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Zool. Anz. vol. xv. 1892, p. 52.
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Archiv Naturg. 58 Jahrg. Bd. i. 1892, p. 333.

[230]
I Chetognati, Flora u. Fauna d. Golfes von Neapel, Mon. v. 1883.
[231]
loc. cit.
[232]
loc. cit.
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[234]
Phil. Trans. vol. xix. No. 220, p. 254 (abridged ed. vol. iii. 1705, p.
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Ibid. vol. xxiii. No. 283, p. 1304 (abridged ed. vol. v. p. 6).
[236]
Ibid. vol. xxiii. No. 295, p. 1784 (abridged ed. vol. v. p. 175).
[237]
Ibid. No. 337, vol. xxviii. 1714, p. 160.
[238]
Employment for the Microscope. London, 1785.
[239]
Paris, 1841.
[240]
Quart. Journ. Micr. Sci. vol. i. 1853, pp. 3-8, 65-76.

[241]
Trans. Micr. Soc. London, vol. i. (n.s.), 1853, pp. 1-19.
[242]
Verh. Ges. Würzb. vol. iv. 1854; Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vols. iii. vi.
1851-55.
[243]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vols. vii. ix. xii. 1856-58-63.
[244]
London, 1861.
[245]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vol. xxxix. 1883.
[246]
Ann. Nat. Hist. ser. 6, vol. v. 1890, p. 1; viii. 1891, p. 34.
[247]
Jen. Zeitschr. Nat. vol. xix. 1886; and Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vols.
xliii. xlix. 1886-90.
[248]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vol. xliv. 1886, p. 273.
[249]
Ibid. vol. xliv. p. 396; xlvii. 1888, p. 353; liii. 1892, p. 1.
[250]
For additions see Rousselet, J. Roy. Micr. Soc. 1893 and 1897.
[251]
See p. 228.
[252]
Quart. Journ. Micr. Soc. (n.s.) vol. xxiv. 1884, p. 352.
[253]
The definition of the Orders and systematic position of the genera

and species referred to under this head will be found in a following
section (pp. 220 f.).
[254]
Reprinted in Baker's Employment for the Microscope, 1785, pp.

267 f.
[255]
"Wheel Animals, though found with most Certainty in Leaden

Gutters, etc. are often discovered in the Waters of some Ditches,
and likewise in Water that has stood a considerable Time even in
the House; for I have often met with them, in sufficient Plenty, in a
Sort of slimy Matter that is apt to be produced on the Sides of
Glasses and other Vessels, that are kept long with the Infusions of
Hay or other Vegetables; and probably they are wafted thither by
the Air, when in the Condition of little dry Globules."
[256]
Gosse's account of the "Structure, Functions, and Homologies of

the Manducatory Organs in the Class Rotifera" (in Phil. Trans.
1856) remains as the most complete anatomical account we have,
though his attempt to identify these parts with the modified limbs of
the Arthropod mouth has met with no support from subsequent
workers. Gosse rendered these parts clearly visible by the use of
dilute caustic alkali.
[257]
A modification of this type is seen in the parasite Drilophagus,

where the unci and rami are two-pronged at the end, but the trophi
are not movable on one another, but protrusible as a whole to
serve as an organ of attachment to the Oligochaete Lumbriculus,
to which this Rotifer attaches itself. See Vejdovsky, "Ueb.
Drilophaga bucephalus," etc., in SB. Böhm. Ges. Jahrg. 1882
(1883), p. 390.
[258]
"Zur Rotatorien Württemburgs," in Jahresb. Ver. Würt. vol. l. 1894,

p. 57.
[259]
Similarly Hudson and Zelinka both regard the dorsal antenna as

formed by the coalescence of two antennae. These retain their
distinctness in Asplanchna; in some Bdelloida the single antenna
is supplied by a pair of nerves.
[260]
C. R. Ac. Sci. cxi. 1890, p. 310; cxiii. 1891, p. 388.
[261]
Acta Univ. Lund. xxviii. 1891-92.
[262]
[See, however, Calman, Natural Science, xiii. 1898, p. 43.]
[263]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xxii. 1872, p. 455.
[264]
Arch. Zool. Exp. sér. 2, i. 1883, p. 131.
[265]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xliv. 1886, p. 273.
[266]
Ibid. liii. 1892, p. 1.
[267]
[See further Jennings, Bull. Mus. Harvard, xxx. 1896, p. 1;

Erlanger and Lauterborn, Zool. Anz. xx. 1897, p, 452; and
Lenssen, Zool. Anz. xxi. 1898, p. 617.]
[268]
It does not appear to us that Zelinka is justified by his account of

the development in regarding this cup as other than a part of the
disc.
[269]
The classification we have adopted is a modification of that made

by Hudson and Gosse; we have divided up their first Order
Rhizota into two, and split off from Flosculariidae the family
Apsilidae; removed the Asplanchnaceae from the admittedly
heterogeneous Order Ploima, made distinct families in the Ploima
for Microcodonidae and Rhinopidae, and created a third new
Order for the Seisonaceae. Ehrenberg, Gosse, and Hudson, being
the authors of most of the genera, are designated by their initials
only.
[270]
This second species has also been found in the Northern United
States.
[271]
This Order has been monographed recently by Janson in Abh. Ver.

Brem. Bd. xii. Beilage, 1893, p. 1.
[272]
See Hudson in Month. Micr. Journ. vol. vi. 1871, pp. 121, 215, and
Quart. Journ. Micr. Sci. (n.s.) xii. 1872, p. 333; Lankester, ibid. p.
338; Levander in Act. Soc. Faun. Fenn. xi. 1894.
[273]
In Denk. Ak. Wien, vol. vii. 1854, 2 Abth., p. 15. As has been
suggested by Deby and by Daday, it is not impossible that
Hexarthra is identical with Pedalion (and in this case the latter
name, as newer, should be suppressed in favour of the former);
but we must suppose that Schmarda's figure of the front view is a
combination, more or less from memory or notes, of two sketches
or notes taken some time before publication; the one a side view
somewhat obliquely flattened, showing the two eyes as in
Levander's Fig. 3; the other a front view, showing the two pairs of
lateral limbs in their correct positions under pressure.
[274]
The male of Rhinops vitrea is exceptional in possessing a

complete, functional alimentary canal, with mastax, stomach, and
intestine (Rousselet). That of Proales werneckii has a mastax, but
no intestine (Rothert).
[275]
For a full account of this group see Claus in Festschr. Z.-B. Ges.
Wien, 1876, p. 75; and Plate in Mt. Stat. Neapel, vol. vii. 1886-87,
p. 234; Ann. Nat. Hist. ser. 6, vol. ii., 1888, p. 86.
[276]
[Eighteen more have since been recorded.]
[277]
I have recently found a large species of this genus dwelling in the

shell of the large Cladoceran Crustacean, Eurycercus lamellatus. It
is remarkable for its power of completely telescoping its
extremities within the middle segments, and for its immense foot-
glands, both characters being doubtless correlated with its habitat.
Rousselet identifies it with P. petromyzon.
[278]
Month. Micr. Journ. vol. ix. 1873, p. 287; Journ. Quekett Club, ser.
2, vol. ii. 1884-86, p. 231.
[279]
See Dr. Hudson's very suggestive presidential addresses to the

Royal Microscopical Society, published in their Journal, vols. ix.-xi.
1889-91.
[280]
Euchlanis lynceus.—This is clearly not an Euchlanis, and of the six

names referred to—Ploesoma, Gomphogaster, Gastropus,
Gastroschiza, Bipalpus, and Dictyoderma—the first has priority,
and the other five drop by the laws of zoological nomenclature.
[281]
Journ. Quekett Club, ser. 2, vol. v. 1892-94, p. 205.
[282]
Trans. Micr. Soc. (n.s.) i. 1853, p. 18 (read Dec. 31, 1851): "We
may say, therefore, that the Rotifera are organized upon the plan
of an Annelid larva.... I do not hesitate to draw the conclusion ...
that the Rotifera are the permanent forms of Echinoderm larvae,
and hold the same relation to the Echinoderms that the Hydriform
Polypi hold to the Medusae, or that Appendicularia holds to the
Ascidians."
[283]
Quart. Journ. Micr. Sci. (n.s.) vol. xvii. 1877, p. 399.
[284]
Ibid. (n.s.) vol. xx. 1880, p. 381.
[285]
Arb. Z. Inst. Wien, vols. i. iii. v. 1878-84; Lehrbuch der Zoologie,

part iii. 1891.
[286]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vol. xliv. 1886, p. 1.
[287]
The Microscope (Detroit), 1887-88.
[288]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xlix. 1890, p. 209.
[289]
Ann. Sci. Nat. ser. 3, vol. xv. 1851, p. 158.
[290]
Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vol. xlv. 1887, pp. 401-467, t. xx-xxii.
[291]
The breadth of the latter is estimated from Reinhard's figure.
[292]
The Echiuroid Gephyrea (see p. 434) are by some authorities

considered to be a division of the Chaetopoda.
[293]
Another worm, Histriobdella (Histriodrilus) homari, which is

parasitic on the eggs of the lobster, and which occurs on our coast,
has been placed amongst the Archiannelida. It is a minute form,
with peculiarities in its anatomy which render its affinities
uncertain.
[294]
Quart. J. Micr. Sci. xxvii. 1887, p. 109.
[295]
J. Mar. Biol. Assoc. vol. i. (n.s.) 1889-90, p. 119.

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