"TO CONSERVE"
Almost two decades ago, Packard was captured by
a dream he couldn't shake. He imagined a suburban dumping ground blooming again
in its original riotous prairieearth colors, an oasis of life giving soulful
rest to harried cosmopolitans. He dreamt of a prairie gift that would "pay
for itself in quality- of-life dollars," as he was fond of telling
supporters. In 1974 Packard began working on his vision. With the mild help of
skeptical conservation groups, he began to recreate a real prairie not
too far from the center of the greater city of Chicago. [p. 89]
As a naturalist, he figured it must be largely
a matter of letting nature reclaim the spot. His job would be protecting
whatever gestures nature made. With the help of colleagues and small bands of
farm boys hired by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the
Depression, Leopold nursed 300 acres of young emerging prairie plants with
buckets of water and occasional thinning of competitors for the first five
years. [p. 89]
While evident to us now, the role of fire as a
key ingredient of the prairie was not clear to ecologists and less clear to conservationists,
or what we would now call environmentalists. Ironically, Aldo Leopold, the
greatest American ecologist, argued fiercely against letting wildfire burn in
wilderness. He wrote in 1920, "The practice of [light-burning] would not
only fail to prevent serious fires but would ultimately destroy the
productivity of the forests on which western industries depend for their supply
of timber." [p. 90]
Biology suggests that in addition to regulating
the numbers of connections per "node" in a network, a system tends to
also regulate the "connectance" (the strength of coupledness) between
each pair of nodes in a network. Nature seems to conserve connectance.
We should thus expect to find a similar law of the conservation of
connectance in cultural, economic, and mechanical systems, although I am
not aware of any studies that have attempted to show this. [p. 131]
One way the self-organizing system of culture
can survive is by consuming human biological resources. And human bodies often
have legitimate motivation in surrendering certain jobs. Books relieve the
human mind of long-term storage rents, freeing it up for other things, while
language compresses awkward hand-waving communication into a thrifty, energy
conserving voice. [p. 443]
While evolution is inventive, it is also conservative,
making do with what is available. Biology rarely starts over. It begins with
the past, which is distilled in the development of the organism. By the time an
organism arrives at the end of its natal development, the millions of tradeoffs
it has incurred forever block the chance to evolve in certain other directions.
Evolution without a body is limitless. Evolution with a body, wrapped in
development and prevented from retreating by its current success, is bound by
endless constraints. But these constraints give it a place to stand. It may be
that for artificial evolution to get anywhere, it too may need to wear a body.
[p. 464]
Inside the genome, genes are interconnected to
the point that the gene can become grid-locked-A is waiting on B, B is waiting
on C, and C is waiting on A. This internal linkage raises a conservative
force within the genome that pushes on itself to keep the genome
unchanged-regardless of what body it makes. Like a complex system, the genetic
circuitry tends to resist perturbations by restricting allowable variations. The
genome seeks to persist as a cohesive unity. [p. 472]
There were many times when I felt that Stuart
Kauffman, medical doctor, philosopher, mathematician, theoretical biologist,
and MacArthur Award recipient, was embarrassed by the wild question he had been
dealt. "Order for free" flies in the face of a conservative
science that has rejected every past theory of creative order hidden in the
universe. It would probably reject his. While the rest of the contemporary
scientific world sees butterflies of random chance sowing out-of-control,
nonlinear effects in every facet of the universe, Kauffman asks if perhaps the
butterflies of chaos sleep. He wakes the possibility of an overarching design
dwelling within creation, quieting disorder and birthing an ordered stillness. [p.
492]
In 1824, the French military engineer Carnot
(rhymes with Godot, the tardy lead in Samuel Beckett's play) derived a
principle that later became known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Roughly
paraphrased it goes thus: all systems everywhere run down over time. Together
with the First Law (that energy is conserved overall), Carnot's Second
Law was the key framework in the following century for understanding not only
heat but most of physics, chemistry, and quantum mechanics. In short, the
theory of heat undergirds all of modern physical science. [p. 499]
"TO PRESERVE"
Minsky sees intelligence as generated by
"a loosely-knitted league of almost separate agencies with almost
independent goals." Those agencies that succeed are preserved, and
those that don't vanish over time. In that sense, the brain is no monopoly, but
a ruthless cutthroat ecology, where competition breeds an emergent cooperation.
[p. 69]
As Lovelock noted, we have dug up no ancient
rocks without also digging up ancient life preserved in them. John von
Neumann, who thought of life in mathematical terms, said, "living
organisms are...by any reasonable theory of probability or thermodynamics,
highly improbable...[However] if by any peculiar accident there should ever be
one of them, from there on the rules of probability do not apply, and there
will be many of them." [p. 141]
In turbulence is the preservation of the world.
[p. 176]
Variety was forced by sexually swapping
branches from one tree to the next. Sometimes a long branch was grafted, other
times a mere twig or terminal "leaf." Each branch could be thought of
as an intact subroutine of logic made of smaller branches. In this way, bits of
equation (a branch), or a little routine that worked and was valuable, had a
chance of being preserved or even passed around. [p. 417]
Evolution, Darwin said, "is daily and
hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
silently and insensibly working...." [p. 475]
In 1952, engineer Ross Ashby wrote in his
influential book Design for a Brain, "The development of life on earth
must not be seen as something remarkable. On the contrary, it was inevitable.
It was inevitable in the sense that if a system as large as the surface of the
earth, basically polystable, is kept gently simmering dynamically for five
thousand million years, then nothing short of a miracle could keep the system
away from those states in which the variables are aggregated into intensely selfpreserved
forms." [p. 505]
