By VINOD K. WADHAWAN - NIRMUKTA
Added: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Bala for the link.
http://nirmukta.com/2010/02/02/complexity-explained-14-biological-complexity-at-the-edge-of-chaos/

Living entities have evolved to possess enormous amounts of order and complexity. Can Darwinian natural selection alone explain this order? 1Probably not. We must also take note of the inherent tendency of all complex adaptive systems to move towards self-organized states of optimum order. Biological and other kinds of complexity thrive best at the ‘edge of chaos,’ and this is where evolutionary forces usually operate. The dynamics of complexity around the edge of chaos is ideally suited for evolution that does not destroy self-organization.

14.1 Introduction

Self-organization is a characteristic feature of any open, far-from-equilibrium complex system. As emphasized by Stuart Kauffman, it is on this existing order that Darwinian natural selection operates and further adapts it to the environment. In other words, natural selection is not the sole source of order in biology. Being complex systems, biological entities tend to self-organize anyway. As Kauffman said in At Home in the Universe (1995):

Home in the Universe (1995):

I suspect that the fate of all complex adaptive systems in the biosphere — from single cells to economies — is to evolve to a natural state between order and chaos, a grand compromise between structure and surprise. Here, at this poised state, small and large avalanches of coevolutionary change propagate through the system as a consequence of the small, best choices of the actors themselves, competing and cooperating to survive.

He mentions ‘chaos.’ Let us begin by getting familiar with some elementary concepts in chaos theory.

14.2 Elements of Chaos Theory

A chaotic system is characterized by unpredictable evolution in space or time, even though the differential equations or difference equations describing it are deterministic (if we can neglect noise). The motions in a chaotic system are unstable, and this instability leads to a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In the language of algorithmic information theory (cf. Part 4), chaos has the largest (but finite) degree of complexity.
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http://nirmukta.com/2010/02/02/complexity-explained-14-biological-complexity-at-the-edge-of-chaos/

TAGGED: BIOLOGY, EVOLUTION, MATH

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