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 :-)

Well, we may have to agree to disagree on the off-earth population question. Once you buy the "earth is the cradle of humanity" paradigm it is "obvious". Also, if you accept the "exponential rate of technological advancement" theory, you would expect many times more progress in the 21st century as in the 20th. So looking at the shuttle and the space station and saying "too resource intensive" may not be a good guide for what is reasonable in 2050 or 2075. By way of clarification, only a tiny fraction of the off-earth population would live on planets, most would be on satellites, asteriods, and, especially, artificial habitats.

Edited by author 05-19-2001 10:50 PM
And now it appears that Teilhard de Chardin (or successors such as John Stewart) long ago thought through much of this. Here's my IRR post for reference:

I'm late coming to this thread, and have even lost the first post and link.
But WOW, what a discovery for me. Thanks very much to whomever posted the
first message on Teilhard de Chardin.
I've mulled over this idea of cooperation and specialization happening at
greater scales on my sorta-blog[1], so I'm excited to find that much greater
minds have thought this through long ago.
This T. de C. page [2] mentions a publication called Evolution's Arrow
that's derived from Teilhard de Chardin. It's amazingly close to my thoughts
and of course much more comprehensive.
I haven't read the T. de C. materials in any depth. Do they talk about
specialization as well as cooperation?  I think that's important to the
evolution-as-aggregation process.
Here's the main part of my blog entry:
======
There's an evolutionary process that results in a new entity that's an
amalgamation of smaller-scale entities. On the grand scale, this formation
is much more significant than the adaptation of each individual entity
through natural selection. It's the appearance of a more complex, more
organized entity.
At some point, single-celled creatures "evolved into" higher forms of life
where each cell has a specialized function and coordinates closely with
other cells*. Does that same evolutionary process act on humans? As we
become more and more specialized in our work and more highly connected, are
we in fact forming larger-scale entities, or even a single global entity?
We can answer simply: yes, they're called societies and interest groups of
all scales. But I'd like to examine the process of social formation and
relate it to evolutionary processes. Evolutionary processes can be viewed as
the response of a reproducing organism to an environmental pressure that
causes its form to adapt, over generations, in order to survive (viewing it
as an intentional process from the organism's perspective).
What are the pressures on the "Humans On Earth" entity that demand greater
specialization and connectivity in order for it to survive?
======
Now here's the intro to Evolution's Arrow:
Stewart argues that evolution is directional and progressive, and that this
has major consequences for humanity. It argues that evolution moves in the
direction of producing cooperative organisations of greater scale and
evolvability - evolution has organised molecular processes into cells, cells
into organisms, and organisms into societies. The book founds this position
on a new theory of the evolution of cooperation. It shows how self-interest
at the level of genes and individuals does not stand in the way of the
movement of evolution toward increasing cooperation. Evolution progresses by
discovering ways to build cooperative organisations out of self-interested
individuals.
======
[1] http://www.quicktopic.com/blurcircle?SpecializationAndCooperation
[2] http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jhayesboh/teilhard.htm
I'd welcome further discussion on this at
http://www.quicktopic.com/5/H/RdGDfdQyR9Goukww4c5c
It's been going on awhile and meandered a bit, but please just pick up
whereever you like.
[BTW, for me this goes to show that as we become more connected, it's more
and more likely (especially for lesser minds like mine) that any idea we
have has already been thought of, often in the form of a fully fleshed-out
theory. All the hints and background that lead to a new idea have also been
available to thousands or millions of other people (but of course that's no
new idea either).]
Steve

(Steve, since you posted this link in a note to the IRRlist, I'm considering myself "invited" - hope that's okay w/ you and others in this discussion.)

The IRRlist note I sent yesterday (clipped below) seems relevant to this discussion (and perhaps tangentially related to Dan Kalikow's public Web Epiphanies QT). My note was in part a response to Gary Stock's reading suggestion on the Teilhard de Chardin thread: "Wonderfully comprehensive (and worth reading every word): a correlation of progress, people, wildlife, and the web: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1132-2001May8.html ."

Of interest to Irregulars who followed that [Tielhard de Chardin] thread might be Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness, by Duncan J. Watts. The book is a general exploration that asks under what conditions a small world can arise in any kind of network.

From [the Princeton site]: "The networks of this story are everywhere: the brain is a network of neurons; organisations are people networks; the global economy is a network of national economies, which are networks of markets, which are in turn networks of interacting producers and consumers. Food webs, ecosystems, and the Internet can all be represented as networks, as can strategies for solving a problem, topics in a conversation, and even words in a language. Many of these networks, the author claims, will turn out to be small worlds."

For your further edification, here's another paragraph from the Princeton site:

"How do such networks matter? Simply put, local actions can have global consequences, and the relationship between local and global dynamics depends critically on the network's structure. Watts illustrates the subtleties of this relationship using a variety of models--the spread of infectious disease through a structured population; the evolution of cooperation in game theory; the computational capacity of cellular automata; and the sychronisation [sic] of coupled phase-oscillators."

(And which Irregular was it who recently did an amusing little family test on the theory of the evolotion of cooperation in gaming?)