Chemical kinetics as a metalanguage

The structure and models describing chemical reactions are almost trivial. Chemical kinetics generally takes into consideration binary and, rarely, ternary interactions among the molecules. It is a natural tendency to decompose complex phenomena into binary, or perhaps ternary interactions. Therefore the formal theory of chemical kinetics can be extended to describe transformation phenomena (using the term in a broad sense) in populations whose basic components are not molecules. 

There is little chance of giving a general qualitative analysis of (1.6) except for low-dimensional cases. Limit cycle and chaotic behaviour might occur in certain situations, as has been demonstrated. 

The conceptual and mathematical framework of competitive and cooperative phenomena has been extended to socioeconomic situations (see, for example, Peschel Mende, 1985 Peschel Breitenecker, 1984). Many problems of epidemiology and of microbiology can also be converted into chemical language . Quantitative sociology (Weidlich Haag, 1983) also uses models having quite similar structure, as chemical kinetics has. 

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