(Steve, since you posted this link in a note to the IRRlist, I'm considering myself "invited" - hope that's okay w/ you and others in this discussion.)

The IRRlist note I sent yesterday (clipped below) seems relevant to this discussion (and perhaps tangentially related to Dan Kalikow's public Web Epiphanies QT). My note was in part a response to Gary Stock's reading suggestion on the Teilhard de Chardin thread: "Wonderfully comprehensive (and worth reading every word): a correlation of progress, people, wildlife, and the web: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1132-2001May8.html ."

Of interest to Irregulars who followed that [Tielhard de Chardin] thread might be Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness, by Duncan J. Watts. The book is a general exploration that asks under what conditions a small world can arise in any kind of network.

From [the Princeton site]: "The networks of this story are everywhere: the brain is a network of neurons; organisations are people networks; the global economy is a network of national economies, which are networks of markets, which are in turn networks of interacting producers and consumers. Food webs, ecosystems, and the Internet can all be represented as networks, as can strategies for solving a problem, topics in a conversation, and even words in a language. Many of these networks, the author claims, will turn out to be small worlds."

For your further edification, here's another paragraph from the Princeton site:

"How do such networks matter? Simply put, local actions can have global consequences, and the relationship between local and global dynamics depends critically on the network's structure. Watts illustrates the subtleties of this relationship using a variety of models--the spread of infectious disease through a structured population; the evolution of cooperation in game theory; the computational capacity of cellular automata; and the sychronisation [sic] of coupled phase-oscillators."

(And which Irregular was it who recently did an amusing little family test on the theory of the evolotion of cooperation in gaming?)