Stress has been placed on the pattern of essentially opposed modes of comprehending the nature of the problematique and the useful priorities in responding to it. This implies a built-in uncertainty necessary to contain the essential uncertainty encountered in a dynamic developing society {cf. Ashby's Law).

This paper arose from recognition that however excellent any "answer" may appear to its advocates, there will always be others who find good reason to argue or act against it in the interests of their own conception of human and social development. Furthermore, most answers, if they recognize the possibility of such rejection or accord importance to it, either make somewhat naive provisions for "educating everybody" or advocate processes which would lead to much more violent procedures for limiting the influence of those who hold any opposing viewpoint.

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The Soviet statistician, V V Natimov, has recently completed a trilogy of which the third volume (160) constitutes a remarkable synthesis drawing on the entire range of knowledge (including elements of semantics, natural and social sciences, mysticism, and the arts) in an effort to understand how the human mind perceives the world.

Under the concept ecodynamics, Kenneth Boulding, an economist, has attempted an ambitious synthesis which interrelates many physical, biological and social processes that are usually kept apart (152). Of special interest in the light of the argument of this paper is that his synthesis internalizes both its conflictural relationship to other competing visions and the recognition of its own mortality as an artifact.

In the previous section Thompson draws attention to the need to understand the patterns encoded by more complex games. Jantsch cites Eigen who is investigating the new lessons to be learnt in biology concerning the "game of life". And indeed Eigen has recently co-authored a book on the "Laws of the Game" (135). It is to be expected that such games can encode richer and more dynamic patterns, which is one reason for the resources allocated to war games and the hopes of finding "win-win" solutions attached to world modelling exercises based on game theory.

William Irwin Thompson, a cultural historian, has sharpened considerably the ecology-sensitive intuition concerning the psycho-social lessons to be learned from cooperation between co-evolving systems (106). He stresses the importance of an appropriate understanding of the interaction between opposites by citing E.F. Schumacher:

An understanding of development calls for an understanding of how the shapes and behavioural patterns of psycho-social entities are determined. Rupert Sheldrake, a biochemist, has recently explored the limitations of the prevailing paradigm in biology and has put forward an original and revolutionary answer to this problem. His closely argued thesis is that the form, development and behaviour of living organisms, including human beings, are shaped by "morphogenetic" fields of a type at present not recognized by physics.

In a study still in progress, John and David Keppel explore the situation of man at the interface between the entropic degradation of order and the development of new forms of order(134). For them new conceptual tools are required to respond to those aspects of the current social condition for which determinism has proved inadequate, if not dangerous in its efforts to maximize certainty and to marginalize uncertainty. They see the key as lying in the logic of living systems with their inherent ability to deal with uncertainty to their own developmental advantage.

The entropic constraint in social development has been specifically explored by anthropologist Richard Adams. He cites Alfred Lotka's observation that the second law of thermodynamics cannot be contravened by human action. Lotka's principle states that in evolution natural selection favours those populations that convert the greater amount of energy, that is, that bring the greater amount of energy form and process under control.