This “Playing with thinking” story arc about playing with larger and faster
thinking, was prompted by the realization that a Universe of electricity and plasma
is more energetic and powerful than one of gravity and gas.
I’ll continue with a further insight, a Universe composed of plasma is also more intricate.
By that, I refer to theories of complexity that have been developed in recent decades.
Complex evokes connotations of being complicated, of parts so interrelated as
to be difficult to understand. Plasma phenomena go a step beyond
complicated. The parts are so interlaced as to be impossible to understand separately.
Intricate evokes that connotation, so I’ll use that term. In this episode, we'll be playing with
intricacy thinking. Plasma systems, in the sense of plasma physics, are not the only intricate
systems. Biological systems are also intricate. The similarities are why Irving Langmuir,
an early investigator of what had been called radiant matter, changed the name to plasma.
So it shouldn't be a surprise that a changing worldview in physics would be
accompanied by a changing worldview in biology. One arena of this change is the theories of evolution.
The evidence gathered for Darwinian evolution has never fit well with that
theory. Gradual emergence of species by way of natural selection of random mutations of genes.
The fossil record, which is built uneasily on the world view of
uniformitarianism, is nonetheless one of species emerging suddenly, being abundant
over their existence without much variation, and suddenly becoming extinct.
There are no intermediate species as uniformitarian metaphysics expects.
Until complexity theory appeared, there were few terms to describe this at a theoretical level.
Now, in reflection of plasma phenomena, we can talk of discontinuities, attractor states,
emergent orders, and irreversibility. We know much more about systems that are
open and far from equilibrium. They are driven, as distinguished from inertial, and subject to threshold
discontinuities. For example, the state of a plasma discharge will jump from dark mode to
glow mode, to arc mode as voltage and current density increase. As those values decrease, the jumps may
occur at lower values, introducing hysteresis into the equation of state.
The instabilities that Tony Peratt, who is a plasma physicist at Los Alamos
National Laboratory, has described in pulse power experiments, undergo
sequences of quasi-stable steps. They evolve by suddenly changing their
morphology, often from simpler forms to more complex forms with greater order.
The sequences are irreversible, like frying an egg - the egg can't be unfried.
That describes not only the fossil record, but recent observations that have been
ignored for lack of a theoretical framework. Here are a few examples. In the early 1700s,
William Sharon, the British consul to Turkey, brought some ragwort plants from
Mount Aetna back to the Oxford biological garden. The seeds escaped and the plant,
now called Oxford ragwort, spread throughout the city. The railroad came to Oxford in 1844 and
provided a bed of Mount Aetna-like gravel that ran throughout Britain.
Trains provided an efficient suction mechanism to carry the seeds. The plants spread. In some
cities the ragwort crossed with the local groundsel species, despite
having only 20 chromosomes to the groundsel's 40. Hybrids bred true, but
were often sterile with respect to the parents, the definition of a species. Voila,
instantaneous widespread speciation. In York, the Oxford ragwort hooked up
with local groundsel species and produced Yorkwort. In North Wales, the meetup produced Welsh
grounsell with 60 chromosomes. A species appeared in Edinburgh for a while, but died out.
There are many similar stories with other plant species, which are known to
be rather promiscuous, but also with animal species. Chris Thomas, a Professor of Conservation Biology
at the University of York, UK, has documented many instances of modern
speciation in his book, “Inheritors of the Earth.” He claims that the rate of speciation
may be keeping pace with that of extinction. Much of the increase in both seems to be
adaptations to the increased mobility of humans. As in the case of the Oxford ragwort,
that mobility both deliberate and inadvertent, is introducing species to
other species and habitats that they would otherwise not encounter.
The interactions between species and habitats lead to jumps in preferred
states, or resonances in their relationships produ- cing sudden and adaptive rearrangements of genes.
The evidence to support any theory of speciation, the fossil record, is that of
stepwise appearance with subsequent fixity. This doesn't fit well with
uniformitarian assumptions. In 1940 Goldschmidt, the fruit fly guy,
after years of mutating the flies and getting no new species, said it out loud.
He was, in today's lingo, ”cancelled”. In 1950 Schindewolf, a respected
paleontologist, said it, he was cancelled. In 1972, Gould and Eldridge said it,
called it “punctuated equilibrium”, and insisted it was still Darwinian,
because “microevolution”. They barely escaped being cancelled.
The evolution wars are not really about biology. They're about faith, and fervency, and fire
for heretics. From the beginning Darwin's supporters had misgivings about his theory.
Thomas Huxley, called “Darwin's Bulldog” for his passionate defense of the theory,
deplored the many faults with it. He nevertheless defended it as the only
scientific or naturalist proposal. Religious passions immediately
dominated the controversy and alternative ideas were sidelined. But there were alternative ideas that
better fit the evidence. In 1879 Samuel Butler proposed that species undergo a self-
directed development. In 1887 E.D. Cope proposed that species design themselves.
This idea was dismissed as ridiculous, apparently because it was assumed to
require conscious choice. Imagine bacteria voting to rearrange their DNA.
But now we've become aware that complex systems reflexively organize in series
of discontinuous forms. The evolution of plasma discharge instabilities for example.
It's called emergent order, an intrinsic property of complex systems distinct
from ideas of extrinsic, or imposed order such as creationism or intelligent design.
The order emerges from the interaction of relationships that have preferred
states, similar to the emergence of nodes in systems of interacting waves, or
flower blossoms from tiny seeds. No god or intelligent designer or
reified natural law for that matter, which mistakes an abstraction for a
physical entity, imposes it from out- side the system of relationships.
An ensemble of bodies will exhibit properties that aren't present in the individual body and that can't be
reduced to simpler conditions. This has been called “irreducible complexity”.
Intrinsic attractor states and resonances will appear in the interaction of the relationships as
islands of organization. In biological words, species. In retrospect, the systems will appear to
have been designed with purpose, but in prospect they will not be predictable.
A theoretical example of this is the NK model of fitness landscapes, developed by
Stuart A. Kaufman and described in ”The Origins of Order”. Instead of thinking of genes as static
building blocks of species, intricacy thinking will think of them dynamically in relation to other factors,
epigenetic relationships and habitat interactions, for example. These relationships are far from
equilibrium and are driven from one quasi-stable state to another. In view of the behavior of intricate
plasma systems, we should expect attractor states in the relationships and threshold events.
In biological words, stepwise adaptive speciation, where it appears that species design themselves.
At the genetic level, the distinctions between species become ambiguous.
In more cases than in the outright appearance of new species, hybridization
results in gene mixing. The hybrid will have some characteristics of both species and it
may still be fertile, or have reduced fertility with the parents. It will be
classified as the variety instead of a new species. Still, the characteristics exhibited will
be specific, not intermediate or random. The critical difference lies in the
difference of thinking between gene mixing and relationship interactions.
Nor is stepwise speciation itself a uniform process. There apparently
have been several episodes of mass extinction followed by mass speciation.
Although here, one must keep in mind the likely scrambling of the conventional
fossil record, once global electrical disruptions are introduced. Species that live side by side and died
en masse in a global tsunami, could be sorted in flowing sediment into separate
strata, along with radiometric-altered minerals, and after deposition
uniformitarian presumptions would place them millions of years apart. A more detailed description of such a
process was covered in the previous episode of this story arc, “Playing with Power Thinking”.
The actual sequence of events could be quite different. Possibly all conforming geological
strata were deposited in a short time during one global cataclysm.
An unconformity would mark the beginning of the next cataclysm.
Instead of millions of years of gradual horizontal accumulation of strata,
followed by millions of years of tectonic distortion, geological formations could represent
sudden transient disruptions between longer periods of relative tranquility
that would leave few traces. Uniformitarian presumptions may be
interpreting the geological and fossil record exactly in the opposite way it formed.
This kind of wholesale replacement of fundamental assumptions when a worldview
changes, is characteristic. Remember how the conceptual landscape
was overturned when Newtonian dynamics replaced Ptolemaic kinematics.
Previously accepted knowledge is discarded and no longer considered to be knowledge.
Intricacy thinking is not just added on to previous thinking, it replaces much
of it. Just as the Electric Universe model of cosmology replaces the standard model,
larger, faster and more intricate thinking will replace the standard thinking in other scientific disciplines.