Month: September 2022

"COMPLEXITY is the study of the behaviour of large collections of simple, interacting units, endowed with the potential to evolve with time." https://lnkd.in/ecSgRXK View in LinkedIn

ALL ABOUT INFORMATION. "We define biological complexity as the genetic information that an organism has about its environment." https://lnkd.in/ejhFeVa View in LinkedIn

REDUCTIONISM. "As the writer Alvin Toffler so succinctly described, "One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces together again." https://lnkd.in/ecSgRXK View in LinkedIn

HEISENBURGISM. "Many interesting and relevant ecological phenomena cannot be replicated in laboratory conditions, and thus cannot be measured or observed without influencing and changing the system in some way. He also points to the importance of interconnectedness in biological systems." (Sven Erik Jorgensen, an ecologist). https://lnkd.in/eQdwnM9 View in LinkedIn

MARIPOSA. "Complex systems exist on the ‘edge of chaos'. They might show regular and predictable behaviour, but they can undergo sudden massive and stochastic changes in response to what seem like minor modifications. The metaphor of the ‘butterfly effect'—whereby a single butterfly beating its wings can cause a storm—describes, for example, the dependence of a complex system on its initial conditions." https://lnkd.in/eMxMq5U View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGICAL LEAPS. "A growing number of scientists do say that neo-Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain certain jumps in biological complexity: from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from single organisms to entire communities." https://lnkd.in/ezFxqyc View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PHENOMENA. "The jumps — saltations, in complexity parlance — appear to be non-linear emergent phenomena, the result of networked interactions that produce self-organization at ever higher levels. From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is a mechanism of a higher universal law, perhaps even a variant on the second law of thermodynamics." http://www.wired.com/2008/02/complexity-theo/ View in LinkedIn

Daniel Oliver View in LinkedIn

NETWORKED COMMUNITIES. "Bacteria — which may account for up to half of Earth’s biomass — swap genes without reproducing; with millions residing in a teaspoon of seawater, Woese sees them in terms of networked communities rather than individual cells, and interprets their evolutionary history as driven by the non-linear self-organization that’s now being studied at all biological scales." http://www.wired.com/2008/02/complexity-theo/ View in LinkedIn

"THE INDIVIDUAL UNIT in microbiology is not the cell; the primary unit is the organismal community. Cells develop in organismal community; they don’t give rise to them; the evolution of the cell takes place in the framework of this community. The individual organism more tightly coupled to the whole than we recognized." http://www.wired.com/2008/02/complexity-theo/ View in LinkedIn