Measuring social complexity and the emergence of cooperation from entropic principles

Abstract: Assessing quantitatively the state and dynamics of a social system is a very difficult problem. It is of great importance for both practical and theoretical reasons such as establishing the efficiency of social action programs, detecting possible community needs or allocating resources. In this paper we propose a new general theoretical framework for the study of social complexity, based on the relation of complexity and entropy in combination with evolutionary dynamics to asses the dynamics of the system. Imposing the second law of thermodynamics, we study the conditions under which cooperation emerges and demonstrate that it depends of relative importance of local and global fitness. As cooperation is a central concept in sustainability, this thermodynamic-informational approach allows new insights and means to asses it using the concept of Helmholtz free energy. Finally we introduce a new set of equations that consider the more general case where the social system change both in time and space, and relate our findings to sustainability.