And yet more from Roger Lewin’s Complexity book:
- p115 Lovelock: “… homeostasis [of Earth] emerged as a property of the system”
- p115 Lovelock: “… the biota opeates in such a way to ensure optimum physical conditions for itself” — i.e. the actions of life adapts Earth to benefit life (From Ford Doolittle’s review of Lovelock’s 1979 book “It is not novel to suggest that life has profoundly changed the Earth, but it is novel and daring to suggest that it has done so in a seemingly deliberately adaptive way, in order to ensure its own existence”.
- p116 Lovelock: “… like all complex systems in the universe, it has a tendecny to produce stability and survive” & ” I need to show that the stability emerges from the properties of the system, not from some purposeful guiding hand” — see Daisyworld
- a particular Daisyworld simulation had 20 species of Daisy, five of rabbits and three foxes: a decrease in the population led to dips in the fox and rabbit population also
- p117 quote from Alfred Lotka The Elements of Physical Biology (1925): “But it will be apparent (snip) that the physciual aws governing evolution in all probabilty take on a simpler form when referred to the system as a whole thatn to any part thereof”
- p117 “… the Gaia hypothesis did satisfy some of the criteria of complex adaptive systems that Stu Kauffman had outlined (specifically) the emergence of homeostatic mechanisms … possibly a consequence of a system adapting to the edge of chaos”.
- p125 from work by Jim Drake (maybe at Purdue): “the global property of persistence, arising from interaction among species in the community, and not particularly special species at that”
- Stu Kauffman: rugged landscape idea?? (I think this could be fitness landscapes)
- what is a power law?
- p127 “… whatver the communities do, they do as a result of internal dynamics, not in response to anything external … an emergent proprty of a dynamical system”
- p132 Stu Kauffman: “… there’s a price to pay in becoming more complex; the system is more lifely to break, fo instance”
- Book: William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe — about cosmology and the game of life
- p133 Dan McShea (University of Michigan, maybe)
- p135 John Tyler Ponner (Princeton) attempted to develop an objective measure of (biological?) complexity: count the number of different cells in an organism. This should give a sense of the number of specialised functions the organism can perform
- Measuring complexity is difficult
- p137 Norman Packard quote “I view organisms as complex dynamical systems, and what drives their evolution is increased computational ability” and “I’m not syaing that every organism need itself become more complex; second, the sytesm as a whole undoubtedly becomes more complex”
- p137 1977 text on evolution by Theodosius Dobzhansky, Francisco Ayala, G. Ledyard Stebbins and James Valentine : “‘the ability to gather and process information’ is siad to have increased through evolutionary history, and, indeed, to be a mark of progress”
- p138 Francisco Ayala: “the ability to obtain and process information about the environmant and to react accordinly is an important adaptation because it allows that organism to seek out suitable environments and resrouces and to acoid unsuitable ones.”
- p138 Ed Wilson “… also considers information processing a a measure of complexity” and “There’s been a gneral increase in information processing over the last 550 million years, particularly the last 150 million years”
- seems some organisms increase in complexity to adapt to the environment. I guess that some don’t, namely the ones who’s environmental niche is small i.e. lower competition, and they have an advanteage on those approaching their niche ?
