Evolutionary Systems

The Problem?

Imagine a large city, like New York, or London, or Paris: millions of customers, tens of thousands of merchants, thousands of suppliers, all working more or less independently, each looking after their own selfish interests. The suppliers and merchants just want to make as much money as they can, as fast as they can. And the customers just want to buy what they want to buy when they want it, at the lowest price possible. And they can! The shelves are always full, and the prices are always low. But how? Who is in charge? Who has organized this marvelous system?

The not so simple answer is, No One!

The only answer Adam Smith could come up with in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the first modern book on economics, was the "invisible hand of commerce," whatever that is. It is like saying God did it, or it's magic.

Yet, as John Holland explains in Hidden Order (1995), It is a sort of magic that is everywhere taken for granted. Yet these cities have no central planning commissions that solve the problems of purchasing and distributing supplies. Nor do they maintain large reserves to buffer fluctuations; their food would last less than a week or two if the daily arrivals were cut off. How do these cities avoid devastating swings between shortage and glut, year after year, decade after decade?

The mystery deepens when we observe the kaleidoscopic nature of large cities. Buyers, sellers, administrators, streets, bridges, and buildings are always changing, so that a city's coherence is somehow imposed on a perpetual flux of people and structures. Like the standing wave in front of a rock in a fast-moving stream, a city is a pattern in time. No single constituent remains in place, but the city persists.

That is, except in a totalitarian utopia such as the former Soviet Union, where the shelves are frequently empty, supplies fluctuate wildly, and to get even something you do not want, or that does not fit, requires standing in a long line. Because the truth is, the more we try to control a complex system the more poorly it works.

What is the difference between a system with strong central control and planning - that does not work (as Adam Smith also observed) - and a free enterprise system where no one is in control, and everything works beautifully and effortlessly?

Somehow a free enterprise system has "learned" to self-organize itself, and evolve to become the extraordinarily complex well-oiled, efficient machine it is.

But, the same is true with the behavior of complex physical and chemical systems, the organization of organic molecules inside a cell, or an ecosystem, or the biogeochemical cycles that compose the earth. They are intricately complex systems, and they have all come into being through processes of self organization and self evolution out of the chaos and disorder that came before.

But how?

That is the question this course addresses. The principles and processes by which - out of an initially exceedingly simple and initially chaotic universe - marvelously complex systems spontaneously evolve, and hover precariously on the "edge of chaos" ready to make the next evolutionary leap.

These processes represent, until recently, hidden laws in the universe that we are now beginning to understand. Come with us and we will explore and come to understand these laws.

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