Abstract
IN THE preceding pages, we have travelled through crucial periods in the history of science and through a range of topics in the collective dynamics of biological systems. In each of the stops along our way, we have met, in various guises, what I describe as an essential tension: a balance between cooperation and competition, a balance between interactions at the local level – between cells or individual organisms, for example – and external pressures originating beyond these local interactions. We have seen how the balance of these apparently opposing drives plays a crucial role in the emergence of an ensemble of elements into a new individual in its own right. This shift is seen in the early theories of crowd formation, and in Durkheim’s theory of the origin of the division of labor in human society. It is seen in the balance between alignment with neighbors and collision avoidance that generates an immense murmuration of starlings flying over a field. It is seen in the simple shifts in gene expression that take volvocine algae and their relatives from a single-celled to a multicellular lifestyle. It is seen in the quorum sensing that induces individual bacteria to begin forming a biofilm mat and individual Dictyostelium amoebae to form a slug and then a fruiting body. It is seen in the induction of cluster formation by yeast under selective pressure for faster settling in a gravitational field. It is seen in the stretching and folding, in which trajectories exponentially diverge, only to be kneaded back together, that is inherent in the nonlinear dynamics used to model many of these complex biological systems. It is seen in the shift from competition to cooperation via the suppression of conflict that Michod and colleagues define as the key step from selection at the MLS1 to the MLS2 level, which takes an ensemble from being a collective of individuals to an individual collective. The tension between competition and cooperation manifests itself differently in each instance, and my emphasis on this common theme is meant as anything but a suggestion that these vastly complex scientific problems can be reduced to a simple formula. Rather, I have focused on this theme in order to highlight its importance as an Ariadne’s thread that may lead us to the center of the maze and, with luck, back out again.
This is about the thirteenth lead I’ve written for this goddamn mess, and they are getting progressively worse…which hardly matters now, because we are down to the deadline again…and those thugs out in San Francisco will be screaming for Copy. Words! Wisdom! Gibberish! Anything! The presses roll at noon… This room reeks of failure once again.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
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Notes
- 1.
Meaning a power law with exponent −2.
- 2.
Current data, discussed in Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, suggests that we are now in the throes of a sixth mass extinction, resulting from anthropogenic climate change. Indeed, climate scientists have concluded that “humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice that is distinct from that of the Holocene epoch”, and recommend designating the current geological epoch as the Anthropocene, beginning with the widespread use of agriculture and the spread of deforestation (Waters et al. 2016).
- 3.
In a subsequent study, Kirchner and Weil (2000) investigated correlations in rates of extinction and origination of marine families and genera. They found “that extinction rates are uncorrelated beyond the average duration of a stratigraphic interval. Thus, they lack the long-range correlations predicted by the self-organized criticality hypothesis. In contrast, origination rates show strong autocorrelations due to long-term trends. After detrending, origination rates generally show weak positive correlations at lags of 5–10 million years (Myr) and weak negative correlations at lags of 10–30 Myr, consistent with aperiodic oscillations around their long-term trends.” Based on these results, they suggested that “origination rates are more correlated than extinction rates because originations of new taxa create new ecological niches and new evolutionary pathways for reaching them, thus creating conditions that favour further diversification.”
- 4.
For a discussion of how important size scale can be, see Peter Hoffmann’s 2012 book Life’s Ratchet. “Life must begin at the nanoscale,” Hoffmann writes. “This is where complexity beyond simple atoms begins to emerge, and where energy readily transforms from one form to another. It is here where chance and necessity meet” (Hoffmann 2012, p. 91). He argues that the reason for this remarkable confluence is the fact that the exchange of energy among various forms (thermal, chemical, electrical, mechanical) takes place with particular ease at the nanoscale, where these forms of energy have similar magnitudes. Hoffmann does a brilliant job of describing the essential tension between “chance and necessity” by which molecules are able to harness the “molecular storm” of thermodynamic fluctuations to ratchet their way up an asymmetric energy landscape, and clearly draws the analogy to the role of genetic noise in fueling evolutionary change. His argument is a perfect encapsulation of the idea of similarities between scales, coupled with the uniqueness of each individual scale, constrained by the physical yardstick of molecular sizes and energies.
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Bahar, S. (2018). The Essential Tension. In: The Essential Tension. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1054-9_16
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