While browsing the e-news awhile ago, I encountered this article in INQ (Philippine Daily Inquirer). I was surprised to read this article because write-ups like these are rare nowadays. The writer introduced the concept of Homeokinetics to the laymen without mathematical scribbles.
I have to look for this write-up in Science Journal and see the exposition written by May Lim of UP Diliman (one of my goddesses in UP). This could be interesting because it tackles the Boundary Problem of the complex systems.
Here's the complete article:
Math can prevent violence, says RP physicist
By Queena Lee-Chua Inquirer Last updated 02:41am (Mla time) 09/30/2007
MANILA, Philippines -- After the 9/11 attacks in the United States, I visited a Muslim vendor at the Greenhills Shopping Center tiangge. I asked her if she had experienced any repercussions, but she assured me: “We are fine. We are all friends here.”
For many years, Muslim and Christian stall owners have been engaged in friendly competition, as they ply their trade side by side.
At an international conference, I asked a Singapore educator how their country had managed to remain peaceful despite the variety of ethnic groups and religions there.
He replied: “Chinese, Malay, Indian, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu—we grow up together. In school, each group can choose to learn its own dialect and its own faith, but everyone is required to mingle with each other, and all students must learn English. We respect one another’s religions; our temples, churches, mosques are near each other.”
Violence is typically the subject of sociology or psychology.
My classes at Ateneo de Manila University study violence in terms of prejudice, groupthink, aggressive instincts.
A few years back, I tried using math to model conflict, specifically how game theory (popularized by Nobel laureate John Nash, portrayed in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”) could shed light on the Spratly Islands dispute and the 1986 Edsa Revolution.
However, there were too many real-life factors that my simple model could not control, so I stopped that line of research.
But math, it turns out, can prevent violence.
Not game theory this time, but a new field called the science of complex systems, whose principles have long been used to study how chemicals, like oil and water, or solid, liquid and gas, behave in the laboratory, and the boundaries between them. Of course, humans are certainly more complex than molecules. But according to a landmark report that appeared in the prestigious journal Science (Sept. 14, 2007), math can help make sense of how different groups interact.
The lead author of the report is a Filipino—May T. Lim of the University of the Philippines’ National Institute of Physics in Diliman, Quezon City.
“I have always been interested in science, as well as music, literature and the arts, although between science and recess, I would have picked recess any day,” Lim says.
What motivated her to pursue physics?
“MacGyver!” she says—certainly prescient, because, as any 1980s TV buff knows, MacGyver does use his scientific skills to combat violence.
The study on math and violence started three years ago, in the latter half of 2004, shortly after Lim went to the New England Complex Systems Institute (Necsi) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“My personal involvement started about a year later,” she recalls. “I had been working on using modeling to describe other systems during my doctorate work at UP before that. But my mentor and co-author, Necsi president Yaneer Bar-Yam, started research on violence seven years ago in his book ’Making Things Work.’”
More than 100 million people have died in ethnic violence in the last century. Researchers try to pinpoint probable roots, such as resource competition, territorial squabbles, economic competition.
But Lim and Bar-Yam, together with Richard Metzler, now focus on something that has been neglected so far—the boundaries between different groups.
“We performed statistical analyses comparing the predicted to the reported violence, evaluating the ability of the model to determine both where violence occurs and where violence does not occur,” the scientists report.
Different ethnic, cultural or social groups interact in various ways, depending on how much they are mixed. Social and political factors can trigger violence, but it is more likely to occur with specific types of boundaries.
What boundaries? For one, violence tends to occur when boundaries between different groups are not clear.
“When a group is large enough to impose its cultural standards publicly, but not large enough to prevent them from being broken, violence normally occurs,” Lim says.
Think of islands or peninsulas composed of one cultural group, surrounded by a different one. These areas may most likely become hotspots of violence because the boundaries are not well-defined.
By studying census figures, Lim and her group discovered that unclear boundaries were linked to violence during the Bosnian wars in the former Yugoslavia and recent conflicts in India.
For their study on India, the scientists created a map based on the 2001 census showing the relative population sizes of different groups like Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains.
By looking at the boundaries between the groups, they predicted—with an astonishing 90-percent accuracy—locations of extreme violence, especially in Kashmir, Punjab and other areas in Northwest India.
The scientists also predicted accurately that other areas would have lesser violence, such as Jharkhand.
To prevent violence, policymakers need to identify areas at risk and make boundaries clearer. (“Good fences make good neighbors,” said the poet Robert Frost.)
True, groups that are separated by clear boundaries can still experience some antagonism because of other reasons. But boundaries prevent mixing, which minimizes the chance of violence.
The scientists cite Ireland as an example. Because of historical and religious differences, we should expect unstoppable conflict there. But because of clear boundaries that hinder much mixing, violence has generally been prevented in the past years.
Does this mean that we should erect fences among us, the higher the better?
Not exactly, and certainly not all the time, say the scientists: “Caution is warranted to ensure that the goal of preventing violence does not become a justification for it. Even a peaceful process of separation is likely to be objectionable.”
They urge us to think about negative effects of separation, such as displacement of populations. But there is another way.
A friend told me once that he almost came to blows with a neighbor over the task of clearing a giant tree felled by a typhoon:
“The tree lay practically between our gardens. After much argument, we finally came to our senses and cooperated. He cleared the tree, and I paid him for it.”
This brings us to the second result of Lim’s study—one I find more congenial than erecting high fences. Violence can be prevented by thoroughly mixing different groups so that islands and peninsulas do not even form.
The study confirms what my Singaporean colleague told me. In Singapore, more than 80 percent of the population live in public housing, where rules specify the percentage of ethnic groups occupying housing blocks.
National laws force cultural mixing, and various peoples literally have no choice but to live and grow up side by side. There are social tensions at times, but violence is generally absent.
Why is this so? In places where people are highly mixed, no group becomes big enough to develop a strong identity, or to impose its culture on others.
Groups “are neither imposed upon nor impose upon other groups, and are not perceived as a threat to the cultural values or social and political self-determination of others,” the scientists say.
Lim and her group believe that their work can be applied to deal with violence in Iraq and Africa. The model has yet to be applied to the Philippines.
“That would be an interesting project,” Lim muses.
She adds: “The key is to understand how the boundary structure of the population and the geography interact. When violence is sporadic, like what happens in our country, the conditions are likely to be just barely meeting those that promote violence.
“Ethnic violence is a very serious problem. But now we have the ability to help prevent it using a scientific approach.”
Lim’s research has already proven my “suki” right. As long as different groups mix closely together, as they do in the Greenhills tiangge, there is hope for us.
* * *
(The author is a professor of mathematics and psychology at the Ateneo de Manila University. She may be reached at blessbook@yahoo.com.)
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