You know the Eagleton review of RD? Contains the great phrase "appallingly bitchy." I agree with most of it though I don't know what's to be gained from "conced[ing] that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith." Sure--so?
Last week in Nature there was a short, cogent piece by Deborah Gordon on complexity. I think it's related to this. A lot of it was about her fascinating work on seed-eating ant colonies, but it starts and ends with some great pronouncements about non-hierarchical systems and our anxieties about the differences among them, and between those systems and hierarchical ones.
Here's one paragraph: Recently, ideas about complexity, self-organization, and emergence — when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — have come into fashion as alternatives for metaphors of control. But such explanations offer only smoke and mirrors, functioning merely to provide names for what we can't explain; they elicit for me the same dissatisfaction I feel when a physicist says that a particle's behaviour is caused by the equivalence of two terms in an equation. Perhaps there can be a general theory of complex systems, but it is clear we don't have one yet.
Here is another later on: It is difficult to resist the idea that general principles underlie non-hierarchical systems, such as ant colonies and brains. And because organizations without hierarchy are unfamiliar, broad analogies between systems are reassuring. But the hope that general principles will explain the regulation of all the diverse complex dynamical systems that we find in nature, can lead to ignoring anything that doesn't fit a pre-existing model.
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timeasmymeasure
looking for complexity
Date: 2007-03-18 03:41 pm (UTC)Last week in Nature there was a short, cogent piece by Deborah Gordon on complexity. I think it's related to this. A lot of it was about her fascinating work on seed-eating ant colonies, but it starts and ends with some great pronouncements about non-hierarchical systems and our anxieties about the differences among them, and between those systems and hierarchical ones.
Here's one paragraph:
Recently, ideas about complexity, self-organization, and emergence — when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — have come into fashion as alternatives for metaphors of control. But such explanations offer only smoke and mirrors, functioning merely to provide names for what we can't explain; they elicit for me the same dissatisfaction I feel when a physicist says that a particle's behaviour is caused by the equivalence of two terms in an equation. Perhaps there can be a general theory of complex systems, but it is clear we don't have one yet.
Here is another later on:
It is difficult to resist the idea that general principles underlie non-hierarchical systems, such as ant colonies and brains. And because organizations without hierarchy are unfamiliar, broad analogies between systems are reassuring. But the hope that general principles will explain the regulation of all the diverse complex dynamical systems that we find in nature, can lead to ignoring anything that doesn't fit a pre-existing model.