During all this time a broader superstructure of theory was forming. The flapping wings of a butterfly in Rio de Janeiro, said meteorologist Edward Lorenz in his now-famous invocation, can cause a windstorm in Texas. With that, “sensitivity to initial conditions” became a catchphrase.

The linear logic of classical physics is reversible. One plus two equals three; three minus two equals one. Water freezes into ice; ice melts back into water. But while direct relations like those are an obvious part of nature, they are also always contained in the larger dynamics of living systems. And those dynamics are ultimately nonlinear. There, not only do multiple and simultaneous outcomes emerge from any one action, but the layering of those outcomes—their accumulating history over time—gives rise to developments that can’t be reversed. This unpredictable and irreversible nature is compounded by the feedback loops affecting everything alive. They amplify subtle distortions picked up as they cycle through a system again and again, modifying it to fit a constantly changing environment.

In the view of classical physics, things always move toward equilibrium, much in the way a pendulum sooner or later comes to rest. Organisms are different. For them equilibrium is death. They must avoid it at all costs. New light on life’s ability to not only do that but thrive in the process was shed by Ilya Prigogine. In work he did during the sixties and early seventies, Prigogine brought those tendencies into correspondence with the always-problematic 2nd Law, with its mandate that all energy eventually dilutes into uselessness.

A life form, he said, is a “dissipative structure.” By that he meant an organism is an open pattern—absorbing energy from the sun and matter from the earth, both of which flow through it and then back to the environment in degraded form as waste. But that constant dissipation, he said, is counterbalanced by life’s ability to swim upstream on solar energy. So life remains in a state of profound imbalance. And the more the better. For the further it strays from equilibrium, the more diverse and complex it becomes. In this way, he argued, order “floats in disorder.” In 1977 he received a Nobel Prize for developing nonlinear equations to describe that view.

Tags: chaos theory, Ecology, energy, equilibrium, Lorenz, nonlinear equaitons, Prigogine, waste streams

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Posted on April 22nd, 2006 @ 12:00 pm