No one will control the destination of Tom Ray's soup of critters. They are brilliant in devising tricks, but there is no telling them what trick to work on next. Only evolution can handle the complexities we are creating, but evolution escapes our total command.
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So by cursor-dragging he alters the computer form. "I don't know how else to tell it what to do, such as making its mouth like this," says Lassiter, forming an O with his mouth in mock surprise, "that would be any faster or better than doing it myself."
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Guggenheim reiterates,
"Animators can't know a character until they animate it. They will tell you that it is very slow going in the beginning of a story because they are becoming familiar with their character. Then it starts speeding up as they become more intimate with it. As they get to the halfway point of the film, now they know the character well and they are screaming through the frames."
Strassman wanted to instruct a character in plain English. You simply tell it what to do, and the figure retrieves the appropriate behaviors from the "four food groups of behavior" and combines them in the right sequence for sensible action. If you tell it to stand up, it knows it has to move its feet from under the chair first. "Look," Strassman warns me before his demo begins, "this guy won't compose any sonatas, but he will sit in a chair."
So prevailing is the logic of nonrandom variation that I was at first flabbergasted in my failure to find any biologists working today who still believe mutations to be truly random. Their nearly unanimous acknowledgment that mutations are "not truly random" means to them (as far as I can tell) that individual mutations may be less than random-ranging from near-random to plausible; but they still believe that statistically, over the long haul, a mass of mutations behaves randomly. "Oh, randomness is just an excuse for ignorance," quips Lynn Margulis.
There were many times when I felt that Stuart Kauffman, medical doctor, philosopher, mathematician, theoretical biologist, and MacArthur Award recipient, was embarrassed by the wild question he had been dealt. "Order for free" flies in the face of a conservative science that has rejected every past theory of creative order hidden in the universe. It would probably reject his. While the rest of the contemporary scientific world sees butterflies of random chance sowing out-of-control, nonlinear effects in every facet of the universe, Kauffman asks if perhaps the butterflies of chaos sleep. He wakes the possibility of an overarching design dwelling within creation, quieting disorder and birthing an ordered stillness. It's a notion that for many sounds like mysticism. At the same time, the pursuit and framing of this single huge question is the quasar source of Kauffman's considerable pride and energy: "I would be lying if I didn't tell you that when I was 23 and started wondering how in the world a genome with 100,000 genes controls the emergence of different cell types, I felt that I had found something profound, I had found a profound question. And I still feel that way. I think God was very nice to me."
But since we have this magical tape of life mounted in our machine, there are further, and perhaps more interesting, things to do with it. If we turned out the lights, flipped the cassette at random, and then played it, would a visitor from another universe be able to tell if the tape was running properly forward or unconventionally backward?
Telling the future, when it comes right down to it, is not solely a human yearning. It is the fundamental nature of any organism, and perhaps any complex system. Telling the future is what organisms are for. My working definition of a complex system is a "thing which talks to itself." One might ask, then: What is the story that complex systems tell themselves? The answer is that they tell themselves stories of the future. Stories of what might come next-whether next is reckoned in nanoseconds or years.
In the 1970s, after thousands of years of telling tales about the Earth's past and creation, the inhabitants of planet Earth began to tell their first story of what might happen to the planet in the future. Rapid communications of the day gave them their first comprehensive real-time view of their home.
Of this culturally produced space, I am most fascinated by the deserts-by the holes. What can we know about what we don't know? The greatest promise looming in evolution theory is unraveling the mystery of why organisms don't change, because stasis is more common than change yet harder to explain. What can we know about no-change in a system of change? What do the holes of change tell us about the whole of change? And so, it is the holes in the space of wholes that I'd like to explore here.
In a letter to Science, David P. Barash tells of his own experience with nonanomalies. He wrote a textbook of sociobiology in 1982, where he stated that "evolutionary biologists, beginning with Darwin, have been troubled by the fact that animals often do things that appear to benefit others, often at great cost to themselves." Sociobiology was launched by the 1964 publication of William Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory, which provided a workable, though controversial, way to interpret animal altruism. Barash writes, "However, stimulated by the Lightman-Gingerich thesis, I have reviewed numerous pre-1964 textbooks of animal behavior and evolutionary biology and have discovered that, in fact-and contrary to my own abovecited assertion-before Hamilton's insight, evolutionary biologists were not very much troubled by the occurrence of apparently altruistic behavior among animals (at least they did not devote much theoretical or empirical attention to the phenomenon)." He ends his letter by suggesting, half in jest, that biologists "teach a course in what we don't know about, say, animal behavior."
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