Chaos As Social Order

display information compression.  The information that is needed to complete the practice repeats and varies through completions of the practice both as enactments and as learning events for others.  At any identifiable moment of a practice variation may take place and may be taken up in place of the preceding version.  What has gone before is accessible to the present only through the memory devices of the group.  There is no guarantee from any such memory device, oral, written, or electronic, that other versions have not existed.  Human living groups resist the infinitization of preferences with the compressions of tradition.

            A tolerable range of difference is discernible in all such situations.  Intolerable variations bring various other behaviors which are also practices such as indifference, correction, ridicule, criticism, rejection, denial, censure, repression, censorship, punishment, banishment, conflict and war.  If a practice, regardless of how momentary, and regardless of where it falls within the tolerable range of difference, does not entrain a group’s reproductive energy then it becomes a transient and dies out.  A transient is a trajectory that does not span the attractor long or far enough to repeat or to reproduce.  As Farmer, Ott, and Yorke assert, in an article on the dimension of chaotic attractors, “Loosely speaking, an attractor is something that ‘attracts’ initial conditions from a region around it once transients have died out” (154).  Small towns in industrialized nations typically have a variety of private businesses and public services.  Parameters such as location, economy, tax base, climate, and ethnicity form the basins of attraction which layer–interpenetrate or

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