In big ecology’s mechanistic, top-down, command-and-control methods, there were clear parallels with the military influence on those programs. But as the decade turned, the seventies brought yet another reversal in the ongoing contest of ideas, highlighting forces in ecology that work from the bottom up. That development was fostered by computers.

Throughout the sixties computers had played a growing role in research. But their primitive sequential processors meant that machine age linear logic was built into the artificial intelligence programs being used. It wasn’t until late in the decade that the advent of parallel processing made really complex calculations possible. The interactions of living systems are so intricate and tangled that until then, any effort to describe them mathematically was too clumsy and approximate. Now scientists could begin to model what was actually going on in organic processes like genetics and evolution.

Computers would quickly take their place as the vital key to the new biology. Through their use, the mathematical probabilities that had found voice in Maxwell and Boltzmann, and become more pronounced with quantum, would flower into a bizarre and beautiful world of patterns within patterns and self-organizing structures that take shape around “strange attractors.” Call it fate, hard work, or dumb luck, a very different kind of machine was evolving, and as a result something new and profound was coming into view.

Tags: boltzmann, computers, mathematics, maxwell, parallel processing, pattern, probability

Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Kate (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 0, from 0 votes

Posted on April 21st, 2006 @ 3:00 pm