Chapter 1 Chaos 1960 s computers took up small rooms Royal McBee a vacuum tube run computer could do something people couldn t Edward Lorenz attracted to meteorology and with the McBee created a wether simulator mimicked weather and with only little changes the outcome was very different Proxi mate knowledge of initial conditions convergence data should cancel each other out Butterfly effect a butterfly in asia flaps its wing creating wind that triggers other events to happen creating a storm in the U S His findings were rejected Linear Systems Aristotle entechy matter and form were linked by a dynamic process of change Matter of a rotting log is transformed to fungus Holistic view Galileo and Rene Descartes world was composed of matter in motion reductionism in order to know how something works works it must be taken apart an the parts examined In a machine each part drives another linear system example System cant feed back on its self flaws the whole may be much more than the sum of its parts Sir Isaac Newton A baseball dropped off a building showed newtons laws but dried leaves impacted by the wind did not Newtons laws only displayed predictability Complex Systems have feed back slow commute on highway causes anger and bad driving This causes accidents and further slows the traffic positive feedback slow to slower Also works with wether which changes rapidly If wether is examined over a large period of time it become less chaotic and more pre dictable through patterns Attributes of complex systems interaction between parts as well as the patterns Emergent properties things that couldn t be predicted just by examining the parts Example termite sin a hive pass messages to and from the queen through chemical se cretions which regulate temperature by studying single termite you would not be able to identify the big picture in a complex system the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts self organization systems that take in energy and use it to increase their level of com plexity through time Ex single celled organism starts off as one cell but increase to a millions cells repre senting a variety of specialized cell types nestedness one complex system within another Fuzzy boundaries separate systems and allow for energy flow between the different boundaries Example biological systems mitochondria in the cell the cell in the organism the or ganism in the ecosystems and the ecosystem in the biosphere Political systems as well Municipal state City state country federal all exist on there own but interact Into the forest Forests are a prime example of a system s high level of self organization Everything is connected An embyro Feuts newborn child adult a forest does the same All waste is a resource for another organism There would be no way to examine one organism to see its role in its ecosystem Bifurcation Negative feedback Maintains the status quo of a system s behavior termite colony and temperature control Positive feedback thinning of the polar ice due to warmer climate The ice becomes wa ter and absorbs more light thus thinning the ice even more Bifurcation when positive feedback builds up until is reaches a new behavioral pattern Bifurcation event example earthquake built from pressure or a revolution This is fast process and although it is slow leading up the bifurcation is abrupt the straw that broke the camel s back straw is loaded on a camel and all it fine until the last block of straw is added causing the broken back Uniformitarianism the idea that all geological features could be explained through slow accumulative change Eldredge and Gould organisms show little evolutionary change over long periods of time followed by and abrupt change call speciation Timing can be unknown de to a mask of positive feedback The Linear Paradigm and Western Culture not everything can be fixed by tinkering with parts in a linear way you must look at the whole picture Ex In the war on terror individuals and groups of terrorists are being sought out but pol icy has not changed allowing future terrorists to continue to act this way Ex people are fixed on finding cures for disease after it happens instead of preventing it from happening in the first place
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