Predicting the unpredictable is the task life has been working on for 3.85 billion years. You can trace the evolution of what I call "future projectors" from the beginning of life to today. When you look at macromolecular megateams with future-scenario predicting capabilities, you're looking at systems capable of storing past experience and modeling the common patterns underlying what appear to be random events. You're looking at macromolecular teams trying accurately to model the world around them by reduction, by compression, by accurately identifying evolutionarily stable strategies, Ur-patterns, cosmic templates. You're looking at one manifestation of the cosmos--life forms and their communities--trying to crunch and reflect what the cosmos has produced to date in order to predict the next move of the particle and photon mobs that will be in their vicinity tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. Sporulation, for example, is a bacterial pattern that records catastrophic events, carries a blueprint for surviving them, and is an option for the future. It's also a projection of the likelihood that disaster will recur again. It's a bet that by reducing all the colony's knowledge and self-reconstruction information to a minimum, to a crystal that needs no nourishment, it will tap into the evolutionarily stable strategy of solidity...and will someday recreate a reasonable model of the colony whose knowledge it compressed. That means we life forms are mirrors in which the universe admires herself. We microbes, slimes, and humans are all cubist carbon painters, charcoal sketchers, drawing nature's portrait in our own peculiar way, roughing out her details then reducing them to their basics.
I and a colleague, Pavel Kurakin, of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are trying to find the basics underlying the decision making processes of humans, ants, bees, and quantum particles. Look how amazingly Pave and I…and you, as you read this…are feeding nature's vanity--focusing our attention, our brainpower, our 100 billion neurons apiece--on nature's intricacies. We are doing it to see through her act and catch a glimpse of her simplicities. We want to see her in the nude. She, in a sense, knows this and encourages it. She hounds us into rounding up thousands, even millions of other humans to focus on her too. That's what we do when we write a journal article, put out a press release, and try to get our article on ScienceDaily, in The New Scientist, or in The New York Times.
Why is nature such a narcissist?
She is forcing us through a fractal labor. Every new reflection of the old in a new medium generates new emergent properties. Those reflections build and build until they pass the tipping point and go from tiny increments to giant leaps in what we call complexity or emergence--inadequate words to catch the wonder of self-reinvention, of bootstrapping, sky-hooking, and leaping upward quite astonishingly. We are the next big cosmic surprise in the process of manufacturing itself. We are nature reflectors, we are past-event capturers, we are reducers and analyzers, we are big-picture viewers, we are the future about to happen predicting the future that will surround us. We are iteration personified. We are nature in the act of growing, in the act of molting and taking on radically new shells, generating and donning them without ever abandoning the old ones. We are the future and we don't know what the future holds. But, Lord, how we do try and try and try.

...post comments in the Yahoo Forum

-Go to the weekly column archive-