Comment on 'a landscape theory of aggregation'

The problem of aggregation processes in alignments is the subject of a paper published recently in a statistical physics journal. Two models are presented and discussed in that paper. First, the energy landscape model proposed by Robert Axelrod and D. Scott Bennett (this Journal, 23 (1993), 211–33) is analysed. The model is shown not to include most of its claimed results. Then a second model is presented to reformulate the problem correctly within statistical physics and to extend it beyond the initial Axelrod-Bennett analogy. Serge Galam, ‘Fragmentation Versus Stability in Bimodal Coalitions’, Physica A, 230 (1966), 174–88. © 1998, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.