The world embarrasses me, and
I cannot dream that this watch exists and
has no watchmaker.
Voltaire
I cannot dream that this watch exists and
has no watchmaker.
Voltaire
Many today echo Voltaire's thought, but the evolution of ideas on how order can emerge without planning is one of the great adventures of the human mind. Modern people can dream of "the watch with no watchmaker". I am not here entering into the creationism debate, but that is the debate that has influenced this posting. My point is that every student should understand the models of the way that order may emerge as the result without planning. Those models are part of modern man's intellectual toolkit. And they are beautiful. Some examples follow:
Voltaire's metaphor of the watch and watchmaker is itself the product of the early part of that adventure inventing models to explain order. It was Newton, following the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others who developed the ideas underlying the clockwork universe. The ancients saw the sun and moon as driven across the sky by the will of the gods. Newton's laws of gravity showed how the orderly progression of the solar system might be explained by the operation of natural processes, and indeed natural processes without the day-to-day control of an outside entity.
Classification precedes explanation in science. Reading the history of science, it is revealing to see how much progress was made in the 18th and 19th centuries in the classification of plants and animals, fossils, minerals, and elements. Think about the mental adventure involved in discovering that electricity and magnetism could be seen as alternative manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. Think about the mental adventure involved in discovering ways that electromagnetic radiation could be seen as manifesting itself as waves or particles according to the way in which the radiation is observed.
In this posting, I am especially interested in metaphors that explain the appearance of order. The first metaphor is teleology -- order is the result of planning. The alternative models are teleonomic -- order emerges from natural processes without planning or a planner.
The planning model is obvious, and seems to be common in the history of many (all?) cultures. Gods and demigods, fairies, nymphs, and other supernatural beings were hypothesized in many cultures to provide the planning and motive forces for what are now regarded as natural processes.
The clockwork universe model is also obvious to moderns, who have lived in a world surrounded by machines. The model involves complex mechanism devised by a planner, and set in motion that continues (for a while or indefinitely) without direct intervention. It is the model of the universe propounded by creationists.
In the 18th century scientists sought models to explain geology as the result of natural processes such as vulcanism, wind and water erosion, and sedimentation. That is a model based on an interplay between construction and destruction. Mountains are raised as a result of the heat of the core of the earth (or more recently by the forces unleashed by the collision of tectonic plates). They are cut down by erosion. The erosion results in sediments that are compressed under pressure into new rocks. Geological features are seen not as the result of the actions of the gods, but of natural processes occurring over eons of geological time.
Adam Smith in 1775 published his conception of markets as establishing order in transactions through "the hidden hand" of unplanned processes. Prices evolve under the uncoordinated actions of many buyers (each with a willingness to pay) and many sellers (each with a willingness to buy). The value of goods was seen as not god-given, but evolved from the production and consumption of the goods in question.
Darwin's theory of evolution, heavily influenced by Smith's hidden hand, postulated a model to explain the diversity of species of animal and plant life as due to random variations and natural selection -- the survival of the fittest. The model is seen by biologists as a huge intellectual achievement, although it was developed by two scientists simultaneously. It provided an alternative model to that of the "great chain of being" planned by an omniscient and omnipotent creator. It has been elaborated, especially through fusion with an understanding of genetics to explain how variation occurs and how characteristics are maintained from generation to generation. That 19th century model, itself evolved, is consistent with a huge body of evidence.
I would suggest that probability and statistics similarly include beautiful models explaining the observed order. The Central Limit Theorem, for example, provides a model to understand how successive samples can have mean values closer together than the observations themselves, as a result of a natural, unplanned process. Similarly, random walk theory explains how paths can be generated by random processes rather than planned ones. Regression theory explained why exceptional parents were on the average likely to have less exceptional children, as a result of natural processes rather than outside intervention.
In the 19th century physicians and scientists were at a loss to explain how it was that whether it got hot or cold, people and animals kept their temperatures constant. If you put a rock in a hot place, it gets hot; put it in a cold place, it gets cold. People put on and took off clothes to control body temperature, but even when they could not do so, the body compensated. This homeostatic mechanism, one of many, keeps the internal bodily environment constant even without the conscious planning of the person. It illustrates a large variety of feedback mechanisms that occur in nature (and in designed control systems) that maintain order in the face of random stimuli. Indeed, the application of feedback control theory to man-made systems might be seen as an illustration of the instrumental value of the teleonomic models created over the last several centuries.
Self-organizing systems came to prominence in the last half of the 20th century. Hebb and then Rosenblatt were interested in how neurons in the brain were modified in the process of learning. It seemed clear that the neurons were involved in learning, yet there seemed to be no way that their activity could be centrally planned. Rather, the complex of neurons and synapses had to self-organize, each using only the information locally available to that neuron. They and their associates demonstrated that such networks could self-organize with simple feedback mechanisms and thereby "learn".
More generally, with the development of digital computers, it became possible to simulate the behavior of systems with large numbers of elements. Even where each element had very simple behavior, the system as a whole could under some circumstances display quite complex behavior. Like a colony of tropical termites, each individual very simple, can create a hugh and complex termite mound, so complex behavior can be found as an emergent property of large collectives of simple elements.
Strange attractors and chaos theory are a similar example of ways to understand order in apparent complexity. It has been shown that even very simple, non-linear systems can exhibit behavior that appears random without understanding of their generation; moreover, techniques have been created to reduce the apparent complexity exhibited by such systems/
Fractiles, are another relatively recently developed approach to describe a broad range of patterns, some of which occur in nature. Patterns as diverse as the structure of a tree or the shore of an island are fractiles, and fractile mathematics serves in part to offer an explation of how such patterns can be created without planning.
It might seem that teleonomic approaches would not apply in formal organizations, where management theorists have emphasized planning for many years. Indeed, small old-fashioned organizations sometimes seem to have all decision making centralized in the hands of the head of the organization. However, Simon and others suggested that "ash can" theories of decision making in organizations were useful models. In these models, people suggested various alternatives, and decisions were made by group processes which were less than fully rational. Thus the behavior of the organiation was the result more of local decisions made (often badly) by local people with incomplete information, The model then became a merger of planned behavior model and of models coming out of complexity theory. The larger and more complex the organization, the more decentralized models of decision making seem to apply.
So, I maintain, the evolution of a variety of models suggesting how order can arise in complex systems even in the absence of planning is a great adventure of the mind, Even a few hundred years ago, people trying to understand events with no obvious causality were pretty much constrained to postulating supernatural causes -- from witchcraft, to mythological creatures, to devine intervention. People with a broad scientific background today have (in addition) a variety of conceptual models with which they can try to attempt to bring order to and understand that behavior.
