"Bifurcations in history"

In a discussion group elsewhere (not a particularly historical one) someone posted this:

Frankly I disagree. Largely because "bifurcation" implies splitting one of two ways and I can't think of any historical turning point where there were only two possible outcomes.

Mind you, that I can't think of any offhand doesn't mean there aren't any. Are there?

And wouldn't the standard historical position be that both gradual and sudden change occur?

(I also think he confuses catastrophe theory with chaos theory, but that's probably not one for this board.)

PS. Why didn't the

While there may be several possible paths, only one will be taken in the end. The thing is that if things don't happen a certain way, there may be several ways in which observers might predict that they will happen, but in the end one way only will happen. Second, third order effects, etc. may confuse the would-be historian/predicter, but the combination of the individual outcome and its n'th order effects will be only one outcome in the end. So we have history as we know it, and for every such event, one and only one outcome (out of several possibilities): thus bifurcation.

I certainly think that the appearance of founders of major religion founders such as Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. do constitute such a bifurcation. What would the world be like without Christianity, Islam or Buddhism?

Secular figures can have a major impact too. What would have happened if Columbus had been shipwrecked? What would have happened if Napoleon hadn't lost at Waterloo (I think it was a matter of 15 minutes difference in reinforcements). What would have happened had Alexandere not died of the plague? What if Temujin had died during his period hiding from his enemies and would have never become Genghis Khan? What if Cortes had been killed during the Aztec counterattack in Tenochtitlan in 1521?

My point is that there are some historical figures and events which can completely alter the course of human history. If things would have gone slightly differently, history would have taken a completely different path (very difficult to predict which, but it would have certainly been one and only one out the possible outcomes).

When it comes to possibilites. I think we're simply arguing about semantics here. Can you thnk of a better word, which implies the path of history forking into an indeterminate number of possibilities? I think that we're simply dealing with the limitations of language, and not that of the theory.

Also, as I stated before, any given change in an event will result in one and only one other possible outcome. Every historical situation has several determinant factors. While the combination of varying the factors are very numerous, thus giving rise to many outcomes, if we only change one factor at a time by a given amount, or a combination of factors by a given amount each, the outcome will be invariably the same. Historically, you cannot have a varying amount of a factor actually happening.

For example, at Waterloo it rained the day before, which had an impact on troop movements. If we pretend we were God for a second, we cannot say that we can make it rain between 1-20 mm of rain, it's going to be either 1, 1.5, 15.16789, etc. Every discrete amount of rain is going to have a different impact on troop movements. Eventually every factor is still going to be varying a set amount from the actual historical factor parameters.

So anyway, while there's an infinite number of possibilities, only one will be chosen after varying the parameters. So we have the actual historical event, and then we have the alternate version of the event, after varying the parameters. That's 2 versions of history, hence bifurcation.

Fork. Node. Juncture?

But that's several versions of history, not two. I agree that the issue of 'bifurcation' is a semantic one, but I do think it is (a) pretentious and (b) misleading.

The separate part of the query is whether history - I suppose I mean societies - mostly change gradually, or mostly change, say, cataclysmically or at least suddnly.

That's not a semantic issue. It's pretty clear what the meanings are.

I can live with that.

The trouble is not only with the word bifurcation, which in that case is evidently a misnomer, but with the way some people are led (maybe not by Laszlo) to start reducing it to concepts of chaos theory which don't fit. It also isn't helped by people confusing chaos theory with catastrophe theory, which fits better, but, as I said. this may not be the place for that discussion.

I posted it here just to see if anyone could come up with an example where there really were only two possible outcomes of an historical event. It doesn't seem to be actually impossible.