a sermon delivered January 22, 2012 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ
I got on the train, like I had many times before that year. I had my backpack, my passport, a baguette, sausage and cheese in case I got hungry. I also had my Thomas Cooke guide with train schedules for all of Europe and my Let’s Go guide, letting me know where I could find a hostel, cheap eats, and the best times to visit various attractions. And so we pulled out a Gare du Nord heading to Metz. Now, I am bilingual… I speak English and Southern, but I do not speak French. None-the-less, I did manage to understand the announcement, made in French, that revealed that half of the cars in the train were going to Metz, and that at some point half would split off and head to Luxembourg. And I was in the wrong half.
Did I grab my backpack and hustle to the other half of the train, arriving in Metz as scheduled having already plotted exactly what bus I needed to take to the hostel, having meticulously scheduled my itinerary? That is what anyone who knew me would have expected, but it isn’t what I did. I went to Luxembourg. I have no idea what I thought I was going to see in Metz… I never got there! Luxembourg was lovely, and the crew I met at the hostel was ready for a little Low Country party.
You might not know this, but I’m just a little OCD. I like things organized and predictable. If the world would just organize itself into clearly marked little boxes and follow well documented rules, I’d be happy. I tend to black and white thinking… it take conscious effort to see the world’s greys. So there was complexity in not going to Metz. What happened was unexpected.
Our topic this week, while less tasty than a night in Luxembourg, is equally filled with complexity and the unexpected. Now, before we get too far in, I need to draw a subtle distinction between complexity as we think of it in every day life and the complexity that is studied by scientists. In popular usage, complexity means made up of many parts, intricate and hard to understand. These definitions carry over to the scientific definition, but the scientific study of complexity specifically looks at what are called complex adaptive systems. And the entire field of study started with hundreds of little “huh?â€-s.
Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humankind has pursued the sort of ordering that exists in my dreams. If you just study it hard enough and break it down, you’ll find the rules and fit everything into a box and everything will be predictable and awesome. Except, in almost every field of study, they discovered that it didn’t work that way.
Let’s get concrete, let’s look in the mirror.
Microbiologists can tell you a lot about the stuff of our physical being. From genome and mitochondria to whole systems. The discreet little bits mostly make sense, mostly behave in predictable ways. But when you add all of the bits and stuff together, when you assemble all the cells and wire-up all the systems, something wildly unpredictable happens. Nothing would predict the development of consciousness and personality. It is as if, somewhere along the line, the simply math of reason, the logic of the Enlightenment, has been replaced with a new set of rules. One plus one no longer equals two, suddenly, in the world of complex adaptive systems, one plus one equals five!
Scientists have discovered this in almost every discipline, and it exists in every field that has to do with life. A complex adaptive system exists in the interdependent relationship of many discreet entities. These entities can all be the same or different. A colony of bees is a complex adaptive system, but so are the local Lions Club, the mixed-species ecosystem of the salt marsh, and the financial markets.
Even though it is complex, a Rolex is not a complex adaptive system. Complexity is relational.
Complex adaptive systems share a number of traits, it turns out, which is why, eventually, researchers crossed disciplines to share what they had learned. These systems are unpredictable, logic and reason cannot predict the surprising behavior of these systems. At some pint they reach a tipping point and become more than the sum of their parts. These systems are amazing robust. A portion of the system can be damage or even removed and, often, and in a way that defies prediction, the system will adapt and survive the assault. The pride of lions that loses the dominant male, the church that loses half its membership, the town flattened by a tornado.
Interdependent, robust, unpredictable, and relational… but wait, there’s more! The final trait shared by complex adaptive systems, is best demonstrated, again, by our souls. The trait is called emergence. Something emerges from complex adaptive systems that is more than the sum of the parts, that is unpredictable.
The primary center for studying complex adaptive systems is the Santa Fe Institute. Where else could you find Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, and a half dozen post-docs sitting around? SFI has used complexity science to contribute to new HIV treatments, to the development of sustainable agricultural policies in Indonesia, to analysis of the wild fluctuations in financial markets in the information age.
Complexity science reminds me of that great Far Side cartoon that showed two scientists stand in front of a chalkboard, with formulas on both sides, and in the middle it says “then a miracle occurs.†Despite all our scientific hubris, it turns out that this is exactly what happens. Sir Arthur Eddington, the British astrophysicist, once said “We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and.'”