Year: 2022

SWARM ENERGY. “In the course of contributing to the group’s collective behavior, every individual in a complex system both transports energy and transforms energy.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

FEEDBACK CONTROL. “A concept that is central to all complex systems is feedback. Feedback provides self-control  within a system.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

DEEP CONNECTION. “Every object or organism within a system is influenced by its own actions as well as its surrounding environment.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE. “Complex patterns can be generated from feedback mechanisms in simple processes.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

UNPREDICTABILITY. “Nature’s systems are not predictable because the effect of Nature’s feedback loops is non-linear. A nonlinear relationship is one in which the cause does not produce a proportional effect.  These non-linear relationships result from the systems feedback mechanisms which are, in turn, usually driven by unpredictable influences external to the organism being affected.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

DISTANT BUTTERFLY. “Feedback systems that respond to a number of different unpredictable influences result in the complexity and unpredictability that we see in Nature’s ecosystems and their organisms.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

NESTED HIERARCHIES. “Ecosystems are hierarchal. Systems are nested within systems. A given subsystem becomes part of a larger system. With this hierarchal structure comes the connectivity necessary for energy and information flow between systems.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

THE UNEXPECTED. “Because of the complex interrelationships between entities within a system, ecosystems usually produce large events far more often than would be predicted by conventional statistical analysis.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

POWER LAW. “Consequently, we see a very different distribution of events than what we have been taught in conventional statistics courses where we utilize the Normal distribution portrayed by the bell curve. Instead, we usually see power law relationships.” https://lnkd.in/gA5rxGc View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS snippets from the truly lovely essay by Bill Graham, a passionate and eloquent marine ecologist, on the subject of interconnectivity in nature. Some of the most exciting concepts including swarm behavior, emergence, complexity, information and energy flow, and nested hierarchies apply to this interesting topic. We intuitively know that nature is much more than a mere sum of its parts, but analyzing what that means has been very challenging. We continue next weekend with the conclusion. View in LinkedIn