Edited by author 12-19-2000 12:52 PM
Maybe the "process of increasing specialization" can be understood to be primarily a process of atrophy. That is, an organism has a set of complementary skills to ensure survival and propogation of the species. The skills that are less useful atrophy.

Using the word "skills" is already anthropocentric, isn't it? And it might lead to unclear thinking. For example, my skill at doing numerical calculations may have "atrophied" because of the ubiquity of electronic calculators, but that's atrophy within an individual for a skill that is already a very modern, invention. Evolution plays little part in that, I would guess.

By the same token, when there is rapid technological change, naturally some individuals will become specialists, and others merely consumers of the specialists' labor. So I have no understanding of an internal combustion engine, but I benefit from the skills of car makers and mechanics. That's not atrophy.

But, from a biological perspective, things look different, I think. The individual known as Jon Waldron couldn't function without the activity of bacteria in my digestive tract, which certainly appear to be "not me." How did this come to happen? How and when did such a cooperative relationship develop? And is it inevitable or accidental?

Sorry to stop in the middle of that thought...

Edited by author 12-19-2000 12:55 PM
It's interesting to think about how and why we humans become specialized, and work from that end of the big question. Atrophy is a symptom. Is it part of the cause too, or are cause and effect inextricably entwined in a long-term multi-scaled process such as this? Specialization does tend to form hierarchies of creators and consumers, as in your engine example. Those without specialties are the have-nots (we can see that in our global society). Why? Hmmm, maybe this points to an evolutionary cause for organism-creation. If a specialist adds efficiency (less energy/cost for improved survivability), the group supports the specialty and the specialist's survival is assured by the group (in a market economy, he often becomes wealthy). This can be a gradual process: one specialty can be added at a time. When everyone has a specialty, you have a completely interdependent unit -- an organism. (Here's an article I just happened to read that notes the process, not as its thesis, but in its development: http://www.cjr.org/year/00/4/frank.asp . Think about those opera singers.) You also have the remnant simpler (non-specialized) organisms that perhaps depend on the more complex organism, and perhaps the more complex organism depends on them. This raises the question of the bounds of the organism. But to the extent that the simpler organisms are fungible, the complex organism doesn't *work* to assure their survival (is this point worth pursuing?). Think of the bacteria in our colons or third-world sweat shop laborers.

[Further, we have the tendency towards merger of the specialists into larger organizations as communication/transportation becomes easier. But let's reserve that for later.]

At the other end of the big question is examining what happened when simple organisms (a simple case being single-celled organisms) "evolved into" multi-celled organisms with specializations. Examining what caused that might shed light on what's happening to us (though the above human focus has really got me thinking). Maybe it's best to iterate. If this were to evolve into a book, I could see a structure with alternating chapters developing (human-level/cell-level).

To Jon & Keith 27-Dec-2000:

This article from yesterday's NYT says in its introductory paragraphs "The networks of molecules in a cell, of species in an ecosystem, and of people in a social group may be woven on the same mathematical loom as the Internet and the World Wide Web."

"We are getting to understand the architecture of complexity," said Dr. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana whose research group has recently published papers comparing such seemingly diverse systems as the Internet and the metabolic networks of life-sustaining chemical reactions inside cells. The similarities between these and other complex systems are so striking, he said, "it's as if the same person would have designed them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/26/science/...html?pagewanted=all

How interesting that the mechanisms for communication among cells and people have at least topological similarities! Sounds like Dr. Barabasi would be a good contact.

Keith, the Stephen Wolfram article [1] was fascinating, though it sounds related to the above idea mostly in that it may supersede it along with the rest of science :-). I think I'll get in the queue for his book.

Steve

[1] http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/1127/162.html

Thanks for the citation, Steve. The part of the article that I found most interesting was the speculation of what rule or rules might give rise to the "topological similarities" of the different networks. I have a dim recollection of reading about self-organizing systems that produced complex results from being left alone to grow with a few simple rules. The authors of the Times article mentioned the "Rich get richer" rule (i.e., the more well connected you are, the more well connected you will become). It would be intersting to know whether that rule has been expressed more formally.

Edited by author 12-28-2000 05:13 PM
Jon, the Forbes article Keith pointed me to (linked in #6) is about Stephen Wolfram's work, which is centered around complex results resulting from simple rules (namely cellular automata generation rules). James Gleick's book Chaos is a great layman's introduction to this and related areas, if you're not already familiar with it.

I think your intuitive leap there, connecting this to the network topology similarities, is well-founded. I'm excited by that very idea: that the communication topologies are similar between cells and people because there's an underlying rule that demands it to be so under evolutionary pressure. It's fantastic that this study of one of the two main factors in the bigger puzzle I want to look at appears now.

The core I want to examine is this: are there fairly simple rules that "demand" the creation, by incremental specialization and interdependence, of a more complex organism under the pressure of competition for resources (the Darwinian environment)?

It seems to be so: an environment of limited resources demands not only adaptation of individuals in order to best the rivals at their level of granularity, it also demands cooperation and specialization of individuals, with concomitant communication between them. In the limit this process forms a more complex organism that survives better than the individuals who merely compete against each other. In actuality it's not that there's an ultimate more complex organism, but a continuous hierarchy of organization and interdepencence.

There's a hierarchy to the comm-topology power law that's very interesting -- you could say that it reflects the hierarchy of specialization (or domination of specialty).

Edited by author 12-29-2000 02:36 PM
More to look at, from a random gander at an old email from that endless font, the evolutionary psychology mailing list: reviews of Mark Buchanan's new book Ubiquity.
(available only in the UK, apparently: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0297643762)

Scientists have recently discovered a previously unrecognised law of nature: no matter what the system, all follow a single universal pattern of change. Mathematically, this pattern is known as a "power law" and , until recently, it was virtually unknown outside physics. However, now that science is looking, its footprints can be seen everywhere. There is, it seems, an archetypal organization working in the world at all levels - the so-called "principle of universality". This discovery heralds what the author calls the new science of "ubiquity" and here documents the coming revolution that this discovery will bring.

But the NY Times article specifically mentioned certain networks that did not obey the power law. Where there is an "environmental" factor that constrains addition links in a network, the network takes on a different topology. This makes me extremely skeptical of the following statement:

"...no matter what the system, all follow a single
universal pattern of change..."

Ok, let me take another tack. Last night, I was chatting with a friend who teaches Biology at the University of Tennessee. He was musing on the difficulty of teaching Evolution to College Freshmen. It's not just the potential of being derailed by the Creationism v. Evolution issue in the home state of the Scopes trial, it's the fact that most people don't understand enough about the theory and evidence for evolution to understand what the debate is all about. Anyway, I mentioned this idea that systems have an innate tendency toward complexity. His response was cautious; "remember," he said, "evolution makes no claims that species evolve to become 'better,' they evolve in the direction of fitness to reproduce given specific conditions of survival" (or words to that effect). From this I gather that sometimes complexity and sophistication lose out, or become irrelevant byproducts of other changes when the conditions governing fitness change.

I'm getting lost here. What was the original question?
I feel like I'm following too many links, when what I really need to do is go back and re-read Origin of the Species.

Edited by author 01-03-2001 11:24 AM
[For some reason I didn't see there was a new post until now. I'll subscribe.]

I'd also be skeptical of something as hyperbolic as "...all follow a single universal pattern of change...". I think that's the journalist talking, trying to summarize with impact. But there seem to be laws that do drive, at least, the local minima that things gravitate towards. If the pattern doesn't emerge globally, it probably appears locally. In fact it probably appears fractally.

Regarding tendency towards complexity, there are two points to be careful of.

The first is one's definition of complexity (as referring to greater order => "more advanced", "better"), which I've never really seen nailed down. It's close to the basic epistemological question, isn't it? I've seen it questioned, most recently for me in William James' Varieties of Religious Experience (see the italicized note here). Information Theory is applicable here, but I only have slight exposure to it in Jeremy Campbell's Grammatical Man. I don't want to go too far afield there yet, though it'll be necessary background for me (as evidenced by the next point).

The second point is that the increased complexity that's of interest to me occurs not within the organism (though there's that), but in the aggregation of individuals with the increasing cooperation and interdependece of specialization. We've heard much of the idea that Darwin's natural selection doesn't tell the whole story -- that cooperation is important to us (I need references here). My main point is that, to the extent this cooperation is tied to specialization, that the organism that's formed is ultimately one at a higher level of scale. Natural selection is about the evolution of the individual of a species; this is about the formation of a new aggregate organism, which I think is actually a more significant evolutionary step. Single-celled organisms were around much longer than anything that has followed -- that first leap to a multi-celled creature was immense. What processes were behind that? What environmental pressures demanded it?

It could be that the demand is actually quite simple -- specialization and interdependence is much more powerful for survival of the individuals than the fittedness of any single individual. In a world where everything was on the same scale -- single celled organisms (or do I need to look subcellular?) -- the emphasis is on individual survival, but once the leap of cooperative specialization was made, that organism must have had a vastly better chance at propagation (provided there was sufficient energy to support the more complex, higher-entropy organism). Is that why evolution has raced at relatively high speed since then?

Note this is saying that this complexity by amalgamation has a great tendency to win out as long as there's sufficient energy in the environment. My intuition here is based on Ilya Prigogene's work that says, in a nutshell, that localized order arises from far-from-equlibrium processes. Brash intuitive follow-on: at the system level, you need sufficient low-quality energy input (heat) to support a high-entropy process like complex life. (A comically cogent metaphor is that your specialized engine designer wouldn't have a good life if there weren't abundant fossil fuels.)

Sorry about all the links and tangents. I'm focussing on building background right now. I can see that the great challenge for an author is to first expand his knowledge as a foundation, then present the message in carefully crafted stages so the reader doesn't confront the whole thing at once. I know you have the capacity to not only follow, but be an excellent critical mind for interaction here. In support of the thesis, I'll do much better with others, especially those with talents I don't have, to help me.

BTW, I'm avidly reading Lives of a Cell now. There's a lot there that's exactly about this. Thomas just touches poetically on it in many places and moves on, but he clearly had some of these ideas.

Damn, I need to create a way to make this QT edit box optionally bigger. I feel like I'm writing on index cards.

I can't think of the reading that made me think single-celled organisms were around maybe an order of magnitude longer than anything else -- it's not true. This geologic time scale at a site for young students shows the era when single-celled organisms evolved lasted 1.4 billion years, and was 2.5 billion years ago. There were another 2 billion years when multi-celled organisms appeared.

The "Cambrian Explosion", bringing a big increase in diversity, happened from 540 to 500 million years ago: "...the fastest growth in the number of major new animal groups took place during the Tommotian and Atdabanian stages of the Early Cambrian, a period of time which may have been as short as five million years."

Edited by author 03-18-2001 04:08 PM
Steve, the penultimate paragraph in your #8 reminded me of Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950). In 1930 he wrote a novel called Last and First Men. Talk about your broad canvas: not only do men unite into, effectively, a world-wide global entity; they contact other such entities in other star systems and eventually communicate with sufficient bandwidth so as to form a single universal organism. They then discover, just as this universe is ending, that it represented only one in a large (infinite?) manifold of universes, evolving toward some sort of perfection; and that their own performance was not the aimed-for pinnacle, but merely one of many not-quite-good-enough attempts along the way.

Last and First Men appears to be out of print in all of its individual editions. It has been published several times bundled with a later Stapledon novel, Star Maker. This one has not been published yet and this one is back-ordered. However, Advanced Book Exchange shows 107 used copies for sale.

Thanks for the interesting reference, Keith. I'll add it to my to-read list.

I posted a note on this topic to Dan Kalikow's Web Epiphanies QT. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Late-breaking thought:

I've posited here that at any scale of organism S there's an evolutionary demand for a larger-scale organism made up of specialized highly-communicating S-scale organisms (noting Lewis Thomas' idea that the definition of organism may be hard to pin down). That's because the S-scale organisms survive better when they're cooperating well in specialized ways.

Let's examine what the limits to this organism-upscaling might be.

Humans can cooperate to form larger scale organisms: societies of various scales. We're now experiencing evolutionary pressure to form a global society -- we call this "globalization".

Could there an evolutionary pressure to go beyond this scale? The scale is Life-on-Earth. There are no other creatures with which to compete for resources -- the Life-on-Earth entity is isolated on its sphere, and its single significant resource is the energy of the Sun. The flaw in Stapledon's scenario seems (not having read it) to be that there'd be little motivation to communicate with other global-scale entities "with sufficient bandwidth so as to form a single organism" (assuming that the costs to develop this bandwidth would be huge) unless specialized resources could be shared across this channel. Further, lacking direct competition with other same-scale entities for resources, there's no evolutionary pressure to share in this way.

So, once we've "acheived globalization", evolutionary pressure will be towards the maximal use of the Earth's resources. What's that mean? I'll try this: the lowest-entropy/highest-information (whew, define that) configuration given the input of the energy of the Sun.

Right now we may be close to an information peak/entropy trough, but outside a sustainable version of this, given that the size of Earth's human population (can we call our brains/bodies the highest-information configuration around?) depends on consuming fuel stored in the Earth over millions of years.

It might be a global challenge like running out of fossil fuel or food that pushes us to larger scale cooperation. Let's take food: E.O. Wilson and others say that we utterly depend on biotech innovation to support projected population size in the next, what, 15 years? We cringe at the concentration of power in situations like that, and at the fragility of such a specialized solution. Are there alternatives that can prevent a starvation catastrophe without concentrated specialization? The obvious one is have fewer children. When we manage to do this, we're resisting our dumb old genes' drive to proliferate -- there's an opportunity for a very interesting tangent. I'll resist.

I'll end this post with a relevant anecdote. Last year when, for about half a day, there was news that a sizeable asteroid had a decent chance of colliding with Earth in a few years, I thought: this could be the ultimate challenge to our collective ability -- would we be able to come up with a way to avoid this? It would take a globally mounted cooperative effort with a huge demand for coordinated innovation and a great sacrifice of resources worldwide that would otherwise be used for basic needs. There'd be countervailing opinions about the probability of the event on one hand and eschatological inevitability on the other hand -- a real challenge to communicating the need. Could we do it? The process would be a good approximation of the formation of a global organism.

A couple of thoughts on this. Regarding, "Life-on-Earth", I think you need to consider the liklihood that a majority of humanity will live off-earth with 100 or so years. Because light-speed is so slow compared to the distances between solar system objects, latency-limited communication communities will form. It isn't clear what population such communities might stabilize at, but the ideal scale for a cooperative organism would be a good guess, if only we knew what it was. The number of cells in the brain is one data-point, another is the number of complex molecules in a cell. Both of these are a "few" billion.

So I would expect relatively compact (less than a light-second in diameter) communities would communicate. compete and trade with each other. As you say, there is the limit of 4*PI steradians of solar output. But this is plenty for many such communities. Once we get to a few billion such communities communicating, competing and trading with each other, then we'll have yet another organizational level to consider. Other stars are really, annoyingly far away. These ideas are pretty well described in Savage's book.

Another factor is Artificial Intelligence (AI). On the same time scale that off-earth residents could be expected to dominate the human population, the explosion of computer power is likely to make AI a reality. A big difference (one of several :-) between AI and Human Intelligence (HI) is that the power per unit of computation is a not fixed at the current biological level. The theoretical bounds on energy requirements of computation are far below the human values. Therefore in a competition for solar energy AIs should be able to get a lot more done with the same solar exposure. Equivalently, many more individual AIs will be able to accomplish the same computation compared to the number of HIs that can be supported. This suggests that AIs will out compete HIs in the long run. For more details on these idea see Moravec's "Mind Children" and Ray Kurzweil, "The Aig of Spiritual Machines".

On the point of my last post is the announcement of Ray Kurzweil's new book The Singularity is Near. It looks like there is lots of material from the book is online, specifically a précis. I haven't read through the whole thing yet, but there are many point in this article that are directly on this topic. Check it out.

Thanks, Ted. I'll check out those refs. Can't say I think off-Earth living will be the norm in 100 years, though there may be motivation, unless the human population is a tiny fraction of what it is now, and we've catapulted some of us outward in a desparate measure to assure survival of the species (see Lessing's Making of a Representative...). It's just too resource-intensive to get and stay out there. Hell, I don't think there'll be golf courses in Arizona, let alone colonies on other planets :-)