Equilibrium Quotes - page 6
At the core of punctuated equilibria lies an empirical observation: once evolved, species tend to remain remarkably stable, recognizable entities for millions of years. The observation is by no means new, nearly every paleontologist who reviewed Darwin's Origin of Species pointed to his evasion of this salient feature of the fossil record. But stasis was conveniently dropped as a feature of life's history to he reckoned with in evolutionary biology. And stasis had continued to be ignored until Gould and I showed that such stability is a real aspect of life's history which must be confronted-and that, in fact, it posed no fundamental threat to the basic notion of evolution itself. For that was Darwin's problem: to establish the plausibility of the very idea of evolution, Darwin felt that he had to undermine the older (and ultimately biblically based) doctrine of species fixity. Stasis, to Darwin, was an ugly inconvenience.
Niles Eldredge
The behavior of two individuals, consisting of effort which results in output, is considered to be determined by a satisfaction function which depends on remuneration (receiving part of the output) and on the effort expended. The total output of the two individuals is not additive, that is, together they produce in general more than separately. Each individual behaves in a way which he considers will maximize his satisfaction function. Conditions are deduced for a certain relative equilibrium and for the stability of this equilibrium, i.e., conditions under which it will not "pay” the individual to decrease his efforts. In the absence of such conditions "exploitation" occurs which may or may not lead to total parasitism.
Anatol Rapoport
This self-analysis is one of the most important magic preliminaries. Many of the occult systems have neglected it, and that is why they did not achieve good results. This psychic preliminary work is indispensable to obtain the magic equilibrium, and without it, there is no regular progress of the development to be thought of. Therefore you ought to devote some minutes' time to self-criticism in the morning and at night. If you have got the chance of some free moments during the day, avail yourself of them and do some intensive thinking...
Franz Bardon
There is reason for this shift of emphasis from any actual price to a hypothetical 'equilibrium' price. It is usually more interesting to know where a train is going than to know exactly where it is at any moment. The 'equilibrium' position of any price, wage, firm, industry, or system is the position toward which it is tending. The importance of equilibrium analysis, then, is that it enables us to discuss the directions of change. If a train is in New- York and its 'equilibrium' position is in Chicago, we are reasonably confident that the general direction of its motion will be westward, even if it unaccountably decides to travel north for the first hundred and fifty miles.
Kenneth Boulding
Prediction of the future is possible only in systems that have stable parameters like celestial mechanics. The only reason why prediction is so successful in celestial mechanics is that the evolution of the solar system has ground to a halt in what is essentially a dynamic equilibrium with stable parameters. Evolutionary systems, however, by their very nature have unstable parameters. They are disequilibrium systems and in such systems our power of prediction, though not zero, is very limited because of the unpredictability of the parameters themselves. If, of course, it were possible to predict the change in the parameters, then there would be other parameters which were unchanged, but the search for ultimately stable parameters in evolutionary systems is futile, for they probably do not exist... Social systems have Heisenberg principles all over the place, for we cannot predict the future without changing it.
Kenneth Boulding
Social stability is the product of an equilibrium between a vigorous majority and violent minorities. Disorder does not come from an increased inner pressure or from the interaction of explosive ingredients. There is no reason to believe that the nature of the violent minorities is now greatly different from what it was in the past. What has changed is the will and ability of the majority to react.
It is hard to tell what causes the pervasive timidity. One thinks of video-induced stupor, intake of tranquilizers, fear of not living to enjoy the many new possessions and toys, the example of our betters in cities and on campuses who high-mindedly surrender to threats of violence and make cowardice fashionable.
Eric Hoffer
Keynes tried to show that market economies could settle in equilibrium states in which the labour market did not clear, and in which the level of unemployment was high. He believed that this was due to a particular example of market failure, developed in his concept of effective demand.
Paul Ormerod
In figure 3 we show the money and domestic asset market equilibrium schedules for given stocks of each of the assets. Along MM the domestic money market is in equilibrium. Higher interest rates reduce money demand so that equilibrium requires a depreciation and thus a rise in the domestic currency value of foreign assets and - hence wealth. The exchange rate thus plays a balancing role by affecting the valuation of assets.
Rudiger Dornbusch
For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself...the increase in the greenhouse gases...has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability.
Margaret Thatcher
To Be or Not to Be: In Nature all life is a question of the minutest, but extremely precisely graduated differences in the particular thermal motion within every single body, which continually changes in rhythm with the processes of pulsation. This unique law, which manifests itself throughout Nature's vastness and unity and expresses itself in every creature and organism, is the ' law of ceaseless cycles' that in every organism is linked to a certain time span and a particular tempo. The slightest disturbance of this harmony can lead to the most disastrous consequences for the major life forms. In order to preserve this state of equilibrium, it is vital that the characteristic inner temperature of each of the millions of micro-organisms contained in the macro-organisms be maintained.
Viktor Schauberger
How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)?... the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness... really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
Erwin Schrödinger
When loops are present, the network is no longer singly connected and local propagation schemes will invariably run into trouble.. If we ignore the existence of loops and permit the nodes to continue communicating with each other as if the network were singly connected, messages may circulate indefinitely around the loops and process may not converges to a stable equilibrium... Such oscillations do not normally occur in probabilistic networks... which tend to bring all messages to some stable equilibrium as time goes on. However, this asymptotic equilibrium is not coherent, in the sense that it does not represent the posterior probabilities of all nodes of the network.
Judea Pearl
