EMERGENT PROGRESS

Have you ever watched a flock of starlings swoop around the sky like a kite, darting first this way then that, the whole flock staying together as a single cohesive mass while it performs these aerial gymnastics? Have you ever wondered, “Who’s driving? Who’s in charge of that flock?”

My inaugural post on The Progressive Worldview Blog was set squarely in the context of contemporary American politics as I argued progressives should be no more shy to proclaim that they have a grounding worldview than newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson is to trumpet his Christian worldview. Yet, for as crucial as the progressive worldview may be to shaping our political views, it is also much more than that. It is a philosophy, a belief system, even a spiritual faith that covers everything; it is a worldview. With that said, if I may borrow a line from Monty Python: And now, for something completely different… 

The answer to the questions above regarding starlings is that, as far as we can tell, none of the individual birds is in charge of the flock. None of them, in fact, would even have the mental capacity needed to organize and direct an entire flock. No disrespect to starlings, but their tiny bird brains are simply not large enough for individual birds to worry about anyone but themselves. Yet, if that’s the case, then who or what is keeping the larger flock organized as it careens around the sky like a single organism? 

This was the sort of question a small group of scientists began to ask around the 1970s. They had noticed that many different natural phenomena seem to work this way, where a large group of individuals behaves in highly organized fashion, the group acting almost as if it were a single entity, yet no one seems to be directing this coordinated behavior—neither any of the group’s members nor some external puppet master. Another example would be an ant colony. True, the colony has a queen, but this queen does not sit on her throne all day, giving orders to the rest of the group. Her sole job is to churn out eggs. So she does her job, and the other ants do their jobs, soldier ants protecting the colony and worker ants gathering up food, and through this coordinated behavior, the colony as a whole is able to meet all of its collective needs, functioning like a well-designed machine. Yet, none of these ants has designed the machine, nor do any appear to have the job keeping the rest of the group organized. The organizing just seems to come about by itself, spontaneously. Yet, how is this even possible?

Somewhat surprisingly, this is not the sort of question modern science is well equipped to answer. Ever since the Scientific Revolution, scientists have been pursuing a strategy known as reductionism. The French philosopher Descartes laid out this strategy in the early seventeenth century. If you encounter a complex problem, Descartes counseled, don’t try to understand it all at once; you’ll just get dizzy with all the details. Rather, break the problem down into its simpler parts, and if needed, break these parts down into yet simpler parts, until you have arrived at parts so simple they cannot be broken down any further. By this point, the parts should be so clear and distinct, so intuitively easy to grasp, that you will have achieved a complete knowledge of them. At this point, you can start putting the parts back together, and soon you will have achieved an equally perfect understanding of the original complex whole.

By and large, this strategy of reductionism has been extraordinarily successful. In studying the nature of matter, for instance, scientists have taken the everyday, macroscopic objects around us like rocks and trees and analyzed them down, not just into their constituent molecules, but into the atoms comprising these molecules, then into the subatomic particles comprising these atoms, on down to quarks and the superstrings out of which they may be built. The knowledge we have gained in this fashion has allowed us to build everything from iPhones to nuclear bombs. Still, the reductionist approach is not terribly helpful for revealing how an ant colony works, or how a flock of starlings stays together.

The problem, in these cases, is that we are explicitly trying to understand how multiple individuals come together to function as coherent wholes. But when we proceed by breaking a whole down into its constituent parts, we just end up with parts, not the larger whole we are trying to study. To be sure, you can study starling behavior by observing individual starlings in isolation from their larger flock. And you can take one of these individual birds and analyze down it still further, perhaps dissecting its brain. This will tell you many things about starlings, including the fact that that individual starling cannot possibly have enough brain power to organize an entire flock. But this analysis of the parts will not tell you who, or what, is organizing the flock as a whole, precisely because, now that you have isolated the individual starlings from one another, there is no more flock to study. There is no more complex whole, just a lump of parts.

This is the scientific dilemma that led a small group of slightly out-of-mainstream scientists to begin focusing all their attention on the phenomenon of complexity, or more precisely on the topic of complex adaptive systems: what they are, how they operate, and how they come together. Some of these scientists  went so far as to found a new research institution dedicated to the study of complexity. Located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it’s called the Santa Fe Institute. Participating members are intentionally drawn, not from any one particular science, but from a variety of disciplines, each of which can bring its own examples to the table of complex systems that seem to spontaneously come together out of simpler parts, thereby becoming something more than the sum of their parts, in the sense of engaging in complex, coordinated behaviors that none of the parts could have engaged in by themselves.

So, what have these scientists learned? Their work is still ongoing, and much of it is conducted in a daunting mathematical framework that is impenetrable to outsiders. Nevertheless, complexity scientists have managed to articulate a few basic principles that even the layperson can understand, including an answer to the basic question of what exactly a complex system is. In the very simplest sense, complex systems have three defining characteristics.

First, such a system will consist of a very large number of component parts. If you catch three starlings and put them in an aviary, they may interact with one another in various ways, but they will not form a flock nor any other sort of complex system. There are simply not enough individuals, nor enough interactions between individuals, for much complexity to arise.

Second, if a complex system will contain a large number of constituent parts, these parts will typically be relatively simple in themselves. More specifically, each part will behave in accord with just a few simple rules. We can imagine, for instance, that individual starlings navigate through the sky by means of just two rules:

1.  If you see some insects in front of you, fly towards them.

2.  If you see nothing but birds in front of you, follow the bird whose tail you are on.

With everyone following these two rules, we can start to understand how the flock would stay together as a flock, even as it performs a series of aerial pirouettes. As one of the birds flying at the front of the flock spots a swarm of insects, it observes Rule 1 and takes off after them. This “leader” does not issue any commands to the rest of the flock, nor—presumably—does it even think about the birds following behind it. But with no other birds in front of it, the leader cannot follow Rule 2, so it just observes Rule 1 and heads for any insects it sees. The birds behind it, meanwhile, cannot see much of anything besides the tails of other birds, so they play follow the leader and observe Rule 2. And thus the entire flock stays together, even as it is darts and dodges around the sky.

The beauty of this arrangement is that the entire flock keeps flying toward swarms of tasty insects, thus helping everyone get something to eat, even though the birds in back have not been spotting any insects, nor have the birds in front made any conscious effort to help their slower companions. Everybody just instinctively follows two simple rules, and a coordinated, productive behavior on the part of the larger flock emerges. And this points to the third defining characteristic of complex systems: emergent behaviors, or more simply, emergence. As the system’s numerous parts behave in accord with their relatively simple governing rules, the entire group begins to behave in more of a complex, coordinated fashion, almost as if it were a single entity following its own, somewhat more complex rules. This new, complex behavior is not dictated from on high, nor is it orchestrated by any of the group’s members. The complex behavior just…emerges. It just…happens. In this case, the whole flock just begins steering itself towards food sources that will feed the entire group, even though the food is spotted by only a small number of individual starlings.

Sticking with the ever-important search for food, the ant colony gives us an even more elegant example of how individuals observing a few simple rules can generate a complex, useful behavior on the part of the group as a whole. In the ant world, again, it is worker ants who collect food, and research has shown that they instinctively follow a set of rules looking something like the following:

1.  Walk away from the anthill in any direction that strikes you.

2.  As you walk along, use your feelers to “sniff” for food. 

3.  If you catch a whiff of food, walk towards it, and when you get there, lay down a strong-smelling pheromone. Then pick up as much food as you can carry and haul it back to the anthill.

4.  If you catch a whiff of pheromone, start walking in that direction, then go back to Rule 2. Resume sniffing for food, that is, and when you encounter it, lay down some pheromone of you own before picking up as much food as you can carry and hauling it back to the anthill.

So what happens when these rules are put into effect? At the beginning of the day, all the worker ants set out in different directions. None of them is in charge, and none of them has a plan for how they will collectively gather enough food to sustain the colony for a day. None of the ants even knows where any food is, which is why they set off in random directions. But then a couple of ants sniff out a rotting leaf. So they lay down some pheromone—which smells even stronger than leaves—before picking up a chunk of leaf and heading back to the anthill. A few more ants pick up the scent of the pheromone, so they change course and head in that direction. When they encounter the leaf, they lay down some of their own pheromone before taking a piece of leaf and heading home. By now, the smell of the pheromone marker is growing much stronger, so even more ants pick up its scent from even farther away; they come and make their own contribution to the pheromone marker before grabbing a chunk of leaf. And thus the whole thing just snowballs, until so many ants have been attracted to the food source that the entire leaf has been carried back to the anthill and the colony has been sustained for another day.

If we step back to view these events from a distance—back far enough that we cannot make out any individual ants, but just see splotches of black where many ants are concentrated—it will look like the colony itself is behaving intentionally, a blob that extends a tentacle to grasp the one piece of food lying in its immediate proximity. As we now know, none of the colony’s members is directing this action. Each ant just follows a few simple rules, in the first case by setting out completely at random. But as all the ants do this, somehow a complex, coordinated behavior on the part of the group as a whole emerges, directing its members toward a useful end.

When you stop and think about it, there are at least two mind-blowing things about the phenomenon of emergence. The first, stressed already, is that throughout the formation and operation of complex systems like flocks of starlings or ant colonies, no one is driving the bus. No one is directing traffic. No one designs the complex system or plans its complex behavior. It all just… happens. It does not happen by magic. Once we understand how ants go about searching for leaves, there is an impeccable logic to the system they have crafted, no doubt by means of trial and error over millions of years of evolutionary history. But even though we can grasp how this would happen, it is still mind-blowing that a bunch of ants would manage to stumble across this ingenious, collective behavior that none of them could possibly fathom as individuals.

The second mind-blowing thing about emergence is that this sort of thing happens all the time. Nature, in many ways, is just one emergence after another. Indeed, much of nature is one layer of emergent behavior on top of another, with the complex wholes emerging on one level themselves coming together to serve as parts that form some even more complex whole the next level up. Amino acids come together to form proteins, proteins come together to form cells, cells come together to form tissues, tissues come together to form organs, organs come together to form organisms, organisms come together to form species, species come together to form habitats, habitats come together to form the biosphere. In each of these instances, new complex wholes emerge out of simpler parts, with each level being defined by an emergent behavior that is increasingly complex and sophisticated.

So what does this all have to do with the progressive worldview? As I see it, being a progressive does not just mean holding a certain set of political views. In the very broadest sense, being a progressive means believing in progress: believing our world can and does make progress over time. To be sure, experience teaches us that progress is often slow, halting, messy, and painful. Nevertheless, holding a progressive worldview means believing that our would is constantly striving to make such progress in the face of whatever resistance it encounters—that our universe has a bias in favor of progress.

A glance back at universal history, moreover, suggests that many of the developments that intuitively strike us as progress can be characterized as a movement from relative simplicity towards greater complexity. When formless gas clouds coalesced into stars and planets in the aftermath of the Big Bang, this was a movement from simplicity towards increased complexity. So, too, was the evolution on planet earth from bacteria to lungfish to amphibians to mammals, all the way up to human beings. We can observe this same movement over the course of human history, as small family bands began organizing themselves into larger tribes, then into villages, towns, city states, and finally nation states, some of them eventually coming to govern themselves in accord with an ideal of moral universalism. We are still working to fully realize this ideal, but as we move in this direction, the group we recognize as “our people” —our society’s accepted ingroup—grows ever larger, more diverse, and more gloriously complex, no longer including just our family, our tribe, or even our nation, but all humanity.

And this, I would say, is progress, whether viewed through the lens of contemporary politics or though the lens of a universe that has been making the exact same sort of progress for nearly 14 billion years.