Re: Social Collapse in History [SCIENCE mag]

On Sun, 28 Jan 2001 franka@fiu.edu wrote:

> 1. though the author says all , and it is probably true of these,   events
> were climactic>social; there were however also social> environmental ones
> already in those times; eg. Harappa [also Maya]. Moreover they are  not
> mutually exclusive, for instance with prior socially caused environmental
> degredation, a smaller climactic shock is enough to push people over the
> abyss. It has also been demonstrated, or at least argued, that the more
> complex a society, them more suseptible it is to lesser climactic shock,
> while less complex ones can be more resistant/adaptible, unless/untill the
> shock becomes so great that they also succumb.


Do you have some support for that demonstration/claim?  It is my
understanding that the opposite is the case:  while a small, local group
will probably be wiped out by a climate disaster, larger more complex
groups have, (I claim, based on the structural/network analysis of
sociologists including Bruce Mayhew), more redundancy and greater capacity
to "weather the storm."  Not forever, of course, I'm not arguing with the
findings reported in Science.  But I question the "MORE COMPLEX >> MORE
VULNERABLE" correlation AGF is proposing.  The implication of the Maya
research is that the Maya collapse was caused by a failure to become
adequately complex!

RH