Later On

You’re undoubtedly familiar with the idea of the biosphere: all living things on earth. As the biosphere moves through time, its composition (the collection of all living things on earth) changes: dinosaurs were big some time back, but circumstances changed and they changed as well, becoming modern-day birds.

This process, driven by evolution once the self-replicators emerged some billions of years ago, should be familiar. If watched from a God’s-eye view at a faster pace through time, it strikes me as looking like a forest fire: spreading, changing as the environment changes, some parts dying out, other parts catching hold. The fire itself is a process through time, just like living things, and groups of living things spread quickly when the environment provides support (fuel, for a fire), and die out in environments that lack support.

Life, as you’ll recall, an example of emergence: non-living matter, over sufficient time and in appropriate conditions, will develop systems that exhibit behavior unpredictable from its elements. While not simply deterministic—what will happen is unpredictable—interesting things happen as everything follows its path of least effort, creating a system with novel aspects.

Human culture is another emergence, the self-replicators in this case being ideas and behaviors (“memes”) that influence and are influenced by the environment and enter into an evolutionary process strikingly similar to that followed by living things (the earlier emergence).

Human culture encompasses all human works, whether concrete (buildings and highways, bridges and damns) or abstract (forms of poetry, literary criticism, styles of music). And you can look at these aspects of human culture as similar to lifeforms, save that the existence of memes depends on how well they get our attention and, in a sense, allegiance.

In watching Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, I suddenly realized that I was seeing the end times of a particular meme species: the concert piano. And, in fact, I realized that Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History of the Piano provides an almost complete study of the development, evolution, and extinction of a particular meme: the pianoforte.

We know the origin, and we know how the instrument evolved and many of the influences on its evolution. A striking development was the social assumption that every home should have a piano. This was driven not only by an interest in music and social status, but also by the need for entertainment. At one time, much family entertainment was created by the family, and the piano fit into this niche quite well.

With this interest, evolution continued and piano species rapidly emerged. At one time, there were 1600 piano manufacturers, which meant a pool of thousands of skilled artisans and good career prospects to attract more. Companies competed, and artisans moved, and evolution continued and the pianoforte became a pre-eminent instrument.

Unfortunately for the piano, the environment changed. Family entertainment began to be imported into the family rather than created by it: radio and television brought professional entertainment into the home, and pianos—bulky, heavy, and expensive—began to lose their appeal.

Now the pool of highly skilled craftsmen is quite small, and new craftsmen are difficult to find because the external work environment has changed. As you watch the movie, you realize that you’re seeing the end of the line. This meme became over-specialized and suited only to a particular (social) environment. The environment changed, and the pianoforte will probably not survive.

The range of crafts and craft workers and the number of highly skilled artisans required to create a piano is astonishing. At the Steinway & Sons factory they have come from all over the world, and in working together their craft has developed even further. Still, each piano is different. So many different craftsmen work on a piano, and so many parts and pieces go into a piano, that different pianos seem to differ as much as different people. Some pianos are easy and light, some are stiff and require effort, and so on. And the sound of the pianos differ remarkably as well, which becomes evident in the sequences of pianists trying to pick out a piano. One goes from piano to piano, playing the opening bars of Gershwin’s second piano prelude at each of several pianos in rapid succession: the differences in the sounds of the pianos are amazing. They all sound good, and they all sound like a piano, but the differences are like the differences between human voices.

One particular pianist/composer spent quite a while in the movie playing at two pianos. He talked about how the piano is just an instrument to “open the door” to the musical conception that the composer created. The instrument must be good, but in a sense it’s like an airplane taking you to your destination, which is not an airplane at all. The piano is a means.

That made me think of all the enormous specialization the piano requires for its environment. Obviously, special skills of those who harvest and age the wood, the skills of the artisans who actually build the piano (and note the special social environment required to give rise to such artisans), but also the specializations of the music instructors, pianists, composers, and even audiences, who develop the special skills and knowledge that allow them to appreciate the music.

The chain of specialization is too vast to be supported by the current environment. The social attitude toward manual labor has changed—certainly in the US, less so in some other countries where great skill as a craftsman or artisan assures one of a comfortable and respected middle-class existence. In the US, even highly skilled artisans are categorized as “blue collar workers”, despite their knowledge and skills supporting and sustaining that ultimate musical refinement, the modern pianoforte.

But evolution continues. Already we have pianos that do not require such craftsmanship. They can be built by CNC machines and the expensive, fragile soundboard, which requires such specialized skill, can be replaced by digital sampling. Thus we still have a “piano”, but it has evolved into a new species. Instead of Tyrannosaurus Rex, we have a Plymouth Rock chicken.

And note that these new pianos will sound alike. No longer will the voice of a piano depend on the serendipitous matching of skills of builders and the pianists. Instead, the pianos are all stamped out with the same voice. In decades to come, as the knowledge and experience are lost, people will still listen to piano music, but with the pianos of that future day, all sounding much the same, people will start to wonder “What’s the big deal?” and decide that people today (by then comfortably in the distant past) simply didn’t understand good music.

I highly recommend the book, followed by the movie, followed by contemplation of the evolution in the memeosphere of human culture.

Parts of the Long Argument.

Previously discussed were how in nature complex systems come together that exhibit properties and behaviors impossible to predict simply from knowing the components of the system: reductionism works in many situations, but it cannot cross the gap from components to complex systems.

Life, which developed using matter and natural forces, all components following their natural path of least effort, was an important emergence—particularly to us—and human culture was the next development. By "culture," I mean all of humanity’s inventions, including but not limited to:

Language, manners, morals, customs, songs, stories, rules, offices, weapons, law government, sculpture, painting, theater, dance, buildings, works of civil engineering (roads, bridges, dams, etc.), crops, foods, cookery, mating customs, family structures and obligations, fabrics, modes of dress and accompanying rules, medical/health practices, religions, and so on.

As is well know, evolution is inevitable when you have this situation:

1. A replicator that makes copies of itself that carry its characteristics

2. Some little variation in the copies

3. Limited resources for which the copies must compete

Once those conditions are met, evolution automatically kicks off, almost by logical necessity: the little replicators will multiply, and some will be able to make better use (or get more of) the limited resources, and those will make more copies of themselves while the less successful replicas are displaced and die off. In the case of life, the replicator is DNA, and we can see what the process has done by looking around us: a wild variety of lifeforms, but strong similarities among groups (e.g., animals rather than plants or fungi; herbivores among animals; deer among herbivores; and the varieties of deer). These family resemblances were what led to the discovery of evolution, and over time an all-seeing observer would see various branches prosper and proliferate and variegate, while other branches die out—displaced by more efficient competitors, or due to random accidents (e.g., an asteroid strike). But the process never stops, and even now humans are doubtless evolving in response to environmental pressures and competition.

The same thing happens with culture. Richard Dawkins postulated a "meme" as the cultural equivalent of a gene, and you can see over time a kind of evolution as some memes prosper, spread, and variegate, while others fall aside—sometimes to be picked up and given a renewed life.

Look at the necktie as a meme, for example: it started as a neck scarf and then gradually its form, use, and meaning changed. It variegated somewhat (long tie, informal bow tie, formal bow tie, etc.), and it was influenced by other memes (men’s fashion, for example, or holidays or wars or whatever: ties with Valentines, ties that proclaim your school or regiment, etc.). The codpiece, OTOH, seems to have died out: a cultural line that wasn’t able to compete.

Lifeforms compete for food, which often is a competition for territory. Cultural forms—memes on up—compete for mindshare. The more people keep the meme in mind and copy it (e.g., tell others about it), the more successful the meme.

I went quite far along this exploration before I recalled that this is actually quite an active field of study: memetics. (I was thinking about the emergence and evolution of culture and writing in my journal about it, but hadn’t remember the "meme" idea.)

It’s been observed that culture shaped humanity as much as humanity shaped culture. Indeed, our large brains are thought by some to be the result of the influence of memes (and having to successfully remember them): over time, those best able to remember more memes (e.g., the meme of how to chip flint; how to make a clay pot; how to make a fire) were more successful and had more offspring. Quite a few memes deal with how to treat others in a society or community, and doubtless the thickies who couldn’t grasp those were culled from the group directly.

"Mutations" in memes come about through inventions of one kind or another, and this holds for all areas of culture. Take food—some mutations might be: new kinds of food, new recipes and their influence on old recipes, and so on. Recipes survive surviving because of broad appeal or intense loyalty among a minority (Southern cooking, for example). Indeed, it’s almost the same pattern as certain infectious diseases: a big outbreak will occur affecting a great number (7-layer salad, for example). After a while, the outbreak collapses (people move on) except in some hotspots (Iowa) where the dish remains popular/endemic, perhaps leading to another outbreak years later. And some persist for millennia: flatbreads, for example, such as tortillas and other forms of bread easily and quickly cooked.

Elements of culture are "real", in that they really exist in the universe, but it’s a different sort of reality. Some parts reside in the material world: a building, for example, or a painting, or a musical instrument. But the material content is not that important—well, for jewelry, perhaps, but even then it’s the immaterial aspects—the human-contributed aspects—that are the point: the use of the building, the meaning of the painting, the design and social purpose of the jewelry (e.g., an engagement ring is not just a ring of metal with a jewel).

This finally resolves something that has nagged at me for years: the reality of the unicorn. It’s not real in the sense that a horse is real, but it is real as a part of human culture, with paintings of it, stories and legends about it, images of it: it a real part of human culture.

This sort of invention is constant in all areas of culture. Sometimes it’s just a matter of faulty transmission (e.g., a change in a recipe that people turn out to like), sometimes it’s due to new resources, and sometimes it’s just somebody thinking up something new. Look at invention in, say, fragrances, musical forms, styles of poetry, modes of dress (fashion as well as style), chemicals, fabrics, tools, source4s of energy, modes of transport, weapons, courtesy, and so on and on.

The "system" of culture is the kind of a system in which every element influences and is influenced by every other element—similar to the material bodies in the solar system working on each other through gravity, for example. It’s like a closely linked network in which pressure on any point is transmitted through and absorbed by the entire network. When the Great Lisbon Earthquake struck in 1755, for example, the event reverberated through human culture in all sorts of ways.

These complex systems have some degree of resilience: damage one part and it affects the whole, and the whole responds in some way. This sort of system—every element affecting and being affected by every other element—is not the only sort, of course. You might have a system where a given element affects only one other element, which affects only one other element… like a mechanical clock. This sort of system is not robust: taking out one element altogether could bring the whole show to a halt.

Remember the video of this little replicator making a protein? Obviously no magic: just elements and chemical compounds following the path of least effort to create the little systems that likewise operate not via volition but the path of least effort.

It occurred to me that our brains are evolved to do something similar to that replicator. What the brain takes in the current state of the body (hunger, cold, thirst, tension, pain, etc.) and the current state of the outside world (presence of predator, stick at hand, large rock, etc.) and everything the brain has accumulated of human culture (the predator’s habits and weak points, how to use a club, etc.), and the brain then immediately finds the "best" (optimal) response for the individual.

Note that this response can be shaped by culture: if you’ve been raised with high cultural values for honesty and integrity and you are happy and full, you are not likely to steal something that a person who has not learned to value honest and who is starving would steal in a second—the two brains reach two different conclusions because of the differing circumstances, but they do it quickly.

Tolstoy (in War and Peace) describes the notion that individuals automatically follow the path of least effort through this multi-dimensional cultural space as well as through the material world. Although at the time we may believe we are choosing freely, looking back years later, we generally say something like this: "You know, looking at the person I was then, with my upbringing and beliefs, and in that situation under those circumstances, I really could not have acted in any other way. I felt I was choosing, but I see that—given who I was and what I faced—I could not have chosen otherwise. I was following a path of least effort for me.

So there goes free will. What we have is NOT determinism: the system is too complex and chaotic for that, and chance events affect outcomes all the time. But so far as our making choices: no, we don’t. We follow cultural currents and trends, and the culture that we follow/make may have little to do with popular culture but is rather the product of our family and the town in which we were raised and what we were taught, all of which might put us in strong (albeit unchosen) opposition to popular culture. Example: the way that I shave.

So people, like the pebbles in interstellar space, continuously find the optimal path—the pebbles through space, we through all the forms and functions of our culture. The summation of everyone’s individual paths will occasionally form strong currents that carries many things along—the French Revolution, for example—just as natural events can occasionally push things along—the Black Death, for example. But "choice" is illusory.

More anon.

Parts of the Long Argument.

As I undoubtedly wrote earlier, I gradually realized that the ideas with which I struggled were already the subject of study, under categories such as chaos theory, complexity theory (or “complex systems”), memetics, emergence, and the like. Once that occurred to me, I stopped working so hard to figure out the argument and ordered in. Just arrived:

The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, edited by Philip Clayton and Paul Davies.

Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, edited by Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys

I’ve been reading in both, and they are excellent. In general, my explanations and insights, though tending toward the inchoate, seem consistent with mainstream thought. I get the feeling I’ve been climbing directly up the cliff face when a few feet over was a ladder. So it goes.

For example, in the first I’m reading a chapter “On the Nature of Emergent Reality” by George F.R. Ellis, and he includes this table:

Each step upward is from a simpler system to a more complex system whose properties cannot be deduced from the component lower-order parts: the emergent system. And, of course, all the levels of emergent systems are “used” in each higher level.

Particle Physics is emergent because particles and the forces were the first emergences from the Big Bang (which, presumably was itself an emergence). Of course, you can count emergences in various ways: a new “level” is not always obvious. One example: when matter/energy emerged protons and neutrons (for example) seem to be an emergence (systems of quarks and gluons), then atoms are next—but only hydrogen and helium. The other atoms might be construed as a later emergence, because first stars/galaxies had to emerge: the other elements emerge from novae.

In Philip Clayton’s opening chapter in the first book, he writes that “the Yale biophysicist Harold Morowitz, for example, identifies no fewer than twenty-eight distinct levels of emergence in natural history from the big bang to the present” in his book The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex.

It seems evident that the entities at each level of emergence are “real”, even if (in effect) completely unknowable from the point of view of prior levels. That is, if you’re looking at the basic elemental particles (down at the quark level), and you know all the quarks involved and even their timelines in spacetime, you would still not know that you’re looking at a molecule with certain properties, much less a protein, much less a tobacco leaf, much less a cigarette.

I emphasize this because the latest and most interesting emergence is “culture,” taking the word “culture” to mean all that is created by humans (and, in turn, creates humans: neither can exist without the other).

More anon.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

I clearly am struggling over some well-explored terrain, so along with trying to figure this out on my own, I am reading quite a few books on emergence, theory of complex systems, chaos theory, and the like.

Emergence seems to be a matter of complex systems that arise whose elements are simpler systems, and this cascading growth seems to be natural. If you want only the very basic stuff of reality, the primary elements that are not themselves systems of simpler elements, you get something like the Big Bang. Once that starts expanding and cooling you get the primary elements breaking apart (the hypothesized singular force, for example, breaking down into the four fundamental forces we know) and then the building of systems of those pieces. On the matter/energy side, for example, we have as primary particles the quarks and the leptons and the gauge bosons. At that point, systems (and emergence) begin. The first systems are quite simple: the proton and the neutron, for example. But they have properties quite different from the quarks that are the elements of each little system. And then protons, neutrons, and electrons, together with the forces, create atoms—a new emergent entity with quite different characteristics than its components. And these merge into stars and galaxies and processes result in novae (super and regular) with new systems emerging: the elements and chemical compounds.

Certain systems of these elements and chemical compounds work in such a way that under the right conditions life emerges: a new bunch of systems with properties that could not be predicted from the chemicals of which it is made.

Notice that the earlier systems hang on as they become elements in higher systems. A squirrel is living matter, but it is a system whose components are regular matter still subject to the laws of physics and chemistry. Even though the squirrel is alive and capable of motion, when it falls it follows the same trajectory as would a squirrel-shaped rock. Although new rules emerge (squirrels hide nuts), the old rules still hold (a squirrel falls under the influence of gravity).

Just now I realized that Douglas Hofstadter covered this ground long ago, and I read some of what he wrote—and what I read is undoubtedly influencing my thinking now. I stopped reading him because I felt an overweening self-regard from him, but probably it was simply envy and jealously. So I’m picking up again his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and starting it again.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

I’ve been thinking more and more about emergence, and I just ordered a few books to further my knowledge (admittedly skimpy). Here’s how I conceive it now. When I speak of emergence, I mean "strong emergence":

Systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system’s components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system supervenes on its components, then it is difficult to account for an emergent property’s cause. These new qualities are irreducible to the system’s constituent parts (Laughlin 2005). The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This view of emergence is called strong emergence.

Collapsing the story a bit, we see something like this:

Big Bang

First emergences: the four fundamental forces

Second emergence: quarks, electrons, neutrinos

Third emergence: hadrons (e.g., protons and neutrons)

Fourth emergence: atomic nuclei

Fifth emergence: atoms (hydrogen and helium)

Sixth emergence: stars and galaxies

Seventh emergence: the elements are created (via novae and supernovae) and chemical compounds: what we normally call "matter"

Eighth emergence: living things

Each emergence sees new entities come into being from the "stuff" (energy or forces or strings or whatever) that was present, though the properties and characteristics of each emergent cannot be predicted from what went before. Moreover, emergent phenomena are embedded in the matrix of their creation: each emergent uses what has previously emerged to create a new entity from the old parts.

For example, the quarks, electrons, and neutrinos that emerged were acted up by the four fundamental forces and followed the universal principle of everything following the path of least resistance. The regular matter—the elements and chemical compounds that we recognize as "matter"—is built upon and from the quarks and electrons and neutrinos that first emerged, though the quarks are now bound into particles and no longer exist separately, but they are the basis and are still present.

Similarly the living things that emerged on Earth still incorporate and use the previous emergents: the fundamental forces continue working as they always have, matter/energy continues following the path of least effort, but the way these things are now organized, into a self-replicating unit, is new. And with self-replication (passing along the characteristics of the originator, with occasional differences) and limited resources, evolution begins inevitably. Evolution simply describes how different patterns of replicators have different success rates, with the more successful creating more copies. No thought, plan, design, or will is present: the living things as well as the matter of which they are made all follow the path of least effort.

In a nutshell, the matter/energy and forces we observe in the universe today are a result of emergence from the Big Bang: simply following natural processes brought them into being from that initial event. First to emerge (in a sense) was physics, then chemistry, and lately biology.

No one doubts that simple animals and plants and fungi have no free will at all. Although they live and reproduce, their life follows the same trajectory and principle as matter and energy: the path of least effort. This is not to say that the result is simple. As I mentioned earlier, even pebbles in interstellar space have orbits of sufficient complexity as to be beyond computation: complexity and chaotic systems exist at every level of existence, the natural outcome of systems in which every part affects and is affected by every other part. But nonetheless, those arise from each component at every level following the path of least effort and interacting in the various modes possible.

Next I want to write about the emergence of humanity, the ninth great emergence.

Part 1 is here.

When you look at “reality”—by which I mean the sum total of the universe and everything in it—you quickly encounter emergent phenomena. Emergence is fascinating in itself: the way in which complex systems seem to generate newer, higher-level complexities.

For example, the initial state of the universe/reality was, to our best knowledge, a tiny dot of intensity that immediately started unfolding in time, following rules we later have deduced as “natural laws”, but are really simply descriptions of what stuff (matter/energy, forces, particles) does when interacting with itself through time. And emergence started at the very beginning, creating new things that (so far as I can tell) could not, even in theory, be predicted.

Indeed, Edward Fredkin’s “digital philosophy” posits that the universe/reality is a cellular automaton whose purpose, such as it is, seems to be to work out what happens when the singular event unfolds in space-time. The idea is that some processes are sufficiently complex that by far the fastest way to determine the outcome is simply to let the process run: it’s figuring out the result as fast as theoretically possible.

So what has emerged. First were the forces, which seem to have split, perhaps, from a single force at the beginning. (Gravity is always the outlier—the hypothesis is much stronger for the other forces: electromagnetic, strong, and weak.) Then matter appears—but only hydrogen and helium, no great shakes.

But emergence continues: stars and galaxies form, and from those emerge the other elements and we get chemistry and chemical compounds.

Things roll along like this for quite a while. Every part of the universe seemed to obey one overriding law: follow the path of least effort. This principle seems to hold in all of nature: water flows only downhill, light travels in straight lines and when reflected follows the shortest possible distance. (In quantum electrodynamics, Feynman shows that although many paths exist, they coalesce around the minimal time path. Highly recommended: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.)

As we later learned, light actually follows the fastest path through space, and if space is curved (by the effects of gravity) light’s path curves as well—but it is still following the overall rule of finding the minimal-effort path.

All of inanimate nature obeys this rule of least effort: physical movement, chemical interactions, and so on.

The next major emergent phenomenon seems to have been life as we know it. So far as we can tell, life originated in deep-sea vents that created tiny chambers for chemical interactions to work through various sequences. As in the case of the pebbles in Part 1 of the argument, everything that was going on affected everything else, so parts of this reaction would mix in with that, and so on—all following the principle of least effort.

New Scientist has an excellent article on how this probably worked, unfortunately locked behind a subscription wall, but fortunately New Scientist is well worth subscribing to. The article contains a link to these 10 steps to the first cells:

We may never be able to prove beyond any doubt how life first evolved. But of the many explanations proposed, one stands out – the idea that life evolved in hydrothermal vents deep under the sea. Not in the superhot black smokers, but more placid affairs known as alkaline hydrothermal vents.

This theory can explain life’s strangest feature, and there is growing evidence to support it.

Earlier this year, for instance, lab experiments confirmed that conditions in some of the numerous pores within the vents can lead to high concentrations of large molecules. This makes the vents an ideal setting for the “RNA world” widely thought to have preceded the first cells.

If life did evolve in alkaline hydrothermal vents, it might have happened something like this:

1. Water percolated down into newly formed rock under the seafloor, where it reacted with minerals such as olivine, producing a warm alkaline fluid rich in hydrogen, sulphides and other chemicals – a process called serpentinisation.

This hot fluid welled up at alkaline hydrothermal vents like those at the Lost City, a vent system discovered near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 2000.

2. Unlike today’s seas, the early ocean was acidic and rich in dissolved iron. When upwelling hydrothermal fluids reacted with this primordial seawater, they produced carbonate rocks riddled with tiny pores and a “foam” of iron-sulphur bubbles.

3. Inside the iron-sulphur bubbles, hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide, forming simple organic molecules such as methane, formate and acetate. Some of these reactions were catalysed by the iron-sulphur minerals. Similar iron-sulphur catalysts are still found at the heart of many proteins today.

4. The electrochemical gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic seawater leads to the spontaneous formation of acetyl phosphate and pyrophospate, which act just like adenosine triphosphate or ATP, the chemical that powers living cells.

These molecules drove the formation of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – and nucleotides, the building blocks for RNA and DNA.

5. Thermal currents and diffusion within the vent pores concentrated larger molecules like nucleotides, driving the formation of RNA and DNA – and providing an ideal setting for their evolution into the world of DNA and proteins. Evolution got under way, with sets of molecules capable of producing more of themselves starting to dominate.

6. Fatty molecules coated the iron-sulphur froth and spontaneously formed cell-like bubbles. Some of these bubbles would have enclosed self-replicating sets of molecules – the first organic cells. The earliest protocells may have been elusive entities, though, often dissolving and reforming as they circulated within the vents.

7. The evolution of an enzyme called pyrophosphatase, which catalyses the production of pyrophosphate, allowed the protocells to extract more energy from the gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic ocean. This ancient enzyme is still found in many bacteria and archaea, the first two branches on the tree of life.

8. Some protocells started using ATP as well as acetyl phosphate and pyrophosphate. The production of ATP using energy from the electrochemical gradient is perfected with the evolution of the enzyme ATP synthase, found within all life today.

9. Protocells further from the main vent axis, where the natural electrochemical gradient is weaker, started to generate their own gradient by pumping protons across their membranes, using the energy released when carbon dioxide reacts with hydrogen.

This reaction yields only a small amount of energy, not enough to make ATP. By repeating the reaction and storing the energy in the form of an electrochemical gradient, however, protocells “saved up” enough energy for ATP production.

10. Once protocells could generate their own electrochemical gradient, they were no longer tied to the vents. Cells left the vents on two separate occasions, with one exodus giving rise to bacteria and the other to archaea.

Notice that all the reactions and developments following the path of least effort: the protons, electrons, and the like in the atoms, the atoms in the elements, the elements in the compounds, and the chemical reactions among them: every single entity, at every level from quark to cell, does what minimizes effort at each step, following the most efficient path.

With this emergence, we get living cells, and as soon as those arise evolution kicks in by logical necessity: resources used by the cells are limited, and cells pass on their characteristics. Cells that make best use of the resources available tend to generate more copies of themselves, and the new process begins: life.

Life at this point is a lot more complex than a rock, but like the rock, life consists of a myriad of particles, each of which simply follows the path of least resistance through space-time, given the context in which it exists.

Things get rather complex. Take a look at this video:

The yellow molecule is messenger RNA (mRNA); it leaves the nucleus; at the ribosome, ribosomal RNA (rRNA) binds to mRNA; transfer RNA or tRNA (in green) can read the three letter code on mRNA or codon; each codon codes for one animo acid (red molecule attached to tRNA); the sequence of codons on the mRNA determines the sequence of amino acids in the protein, which in turn determines the structure and function of the protein.

The video is fascinating: watching the little machine read its instructions and churn out a string of a particular protein. But it’s totally mechanical, in the sense that it is merely matter and forces following the principle of least effort at every level of scale. Of course, what you see in the video is the result of perhaps millions of years of evolution: small simple systems struggling for survival and passing along their characteristics.

I’m slowly working on a long argument that has many disparate parts, and I really don’t know where to begin.

So let’s begin with some pebbles in interstellar space, and consider the variety of forces continuously acting on the pebbles from many sources:

1. Gravity: the pebbles of course attract each other (or, equivalently, distort space-time so that their timelines through space-time show “attraction” among the pebbles. Note that the resultant of the various attractions (the pebbles for each other, plus the gravitational effects of distant stars and galaxies) means that the pebbles’ paths through space, much less space-time, are extremely complex—indeed, constitute chaotic systems that we cannot actually analyze completely. Indeed, we start to fail just with three pebbles (the three-body problem). And it turns out that our own solar system is a chaotic system. Later we’ll look more deeply at chaotic systems and their characteristics. The point here is that the gravitational influence is extremely complex—yet the pebbles unerringly follow the appropriate resultant path of all the different gravitational attractions they experience. At every instant, each body move exactly right for all the gravitational forces acting on it.

2. Electromagnetic radiation: the pebbles are bathed in electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum. This radiation certainly affects the pebbles, both from the pressure of photons and also interactions with the atoms of which the pebbles are made.

3. Heat: heat energy flows in complex patterns through solids. Think of a sheet of metal of varying thickness, perhaps pierced here and there, with heat sources along two edges and heat sinks along the other two. Heat will flow through the sheet in a complex pattern—and yet the heat flows exactly as the system dictates. To the degree that we can analyze heat flow mathematically, it follows rules.

4. Chemical: chemical interactions among the atoms constituting the pebbles may be slow in interstellar space, but we are free to use as much time as we want, consistent with the age and development of the universe. If chemical reactions are possible within the pebbles, they will occur.

5. Physical impacts: other pebbles might bump into them, breaking them apart so the individual pieces have their own paths through space-time.

I’m sure this list of forces could be extended. And each pebble is responding to ALL the forces simultaneously and also finding at every instant the exact right step to take next (in terms of velocity, position, composition, etc.). And, of course, all those things influencing the pebble are moving and changing themselves, and the pebble itself is moving and changing.  Writing down the mathematical descriptions of everything that’s happening and predicting what happens next is not merely difficult: it is impossible. It’s a chaotic system.

And yet we feel quite sure that the pebbles, down to their constituent atoms and quarks and so on, are doing exactly the “right thing” at each instant. There’s no deviation from the path whose each step is the resultant of all the forces acting at the instant.

As I contemplate this, I am amazed at the complexity hidden beneath the surface when we try to get at what is actually going on—but for the pebbles, it’s no problem. They just go with the flow, exhibiting no volition and making no decisions. They simply slide along their path through space-time, each instant exactly determined, but so complex we ultimately cannot analyze it, though we get the general picture.

More to come. Think about that so far.