Science Spin March 2009

Keeping an eye on the big picture

By Tom Kennedy

In an attempt to find out more a lot of effort has gone into looking at less. As a result, the sciences have been sliced up into a whole series of narrow segments, all of which now stand well apart from what we might call general knowledge. Without any shadow of doubt, all this closer attention to detail has transformed the sciences, but as Professor Geoffrey West, distinguished President of the Santa Fe Institute, might argue, if this trend towards specialisation continues we may end up not being able see the wood for the trees.

Recently, Professor West, visiting Ireland at the invitation of the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) explained that our obsession with detail often leads us all astray, and not just in the sciences. The collapse of the financial markets, he said, is just one example of how regulators failed to predict the global consequences of reckless trading. Financial collapse, he said, occurred because no one was paying attention to the bigger picture, and such a knock-on effect is quite typical of large complex systems. Like the butterfly and the hurricane, one small change in one place really can have unexpected, and unintended changes somewhere else.

We live in a world of compex systems, among them IT networks, ecosystems, markets, cities, and life is the most complex of them all. Big systems fascinate Prof West, and he is one of the leading lights in a growing band of scientists who strive to find sense in compexity. At the Santa Fe Institute complexity is high on the agenda, and in Europe IRCSET is one of the eleven Complexity Network Nets, and as Prof West argues, we need to encourage big thinking not just because it's good for science, but because it is also the only way we are going to solve some of the world's greatest problems.

Just because systems are complex, he said, is no reason to assume that they are beyond our understanding. In many, if not all systems, there is an underlying set of rules. Although the underlying rules can be surprisingly simple, identifying them can be a challenge. It took a long time to find out the laws governing movement and gravity, but once we had them, everything we observe in the Solar system made perfect sense.

Complexity

Mathematicians predict orbits with relative ease, but back on green Earth, complexity can be very complex indeed. The planetary movements and global finances are but child's play compared to what goes on day after day in living systems. Even so, as Prof West explained, our body is a system, and as a system it can only remain in existence if it obeys some fundamental rules. Dissecting the innards is not going to tell us what those rules are, and if we start with the cells, or the genes, or the individual organs, we will never understand how all of these components can possibly work together as a coherent system. Yet, here we are, the living proof that complexity cannot be explained by interaction of the constituent elements.

Prof West doubted that we can ever reduce life to a set of rules as simple as those that apply in space, but even so, if we look hard enough for order it is there, just waiting for it to be discovered.

Life, spread over 23 orders of magnitude, is amazingly diverse. Mammals alone range across eight orders of magnitude, and a shrew is a lot different from an elephant. However, looks can be deceptive, and one way to search for rules, is to look at how different animals can have something in common. All animals must eat to stay alive, and as we all know, a meal for a mouse is not going to feed an elephant. In fact, as Prof West explained, we can look at the size of an animal and calculate, fairly accurately, how much energy they need. The interesting thing about this calculation is that it is non-linear.

If we look at metabolic rate, the speed at which animals burn up energy, we find that there is a non-linear consistency that extends right across all orders of magnitude. As body mass increases, metabolic rate goes down, so an elephant ticks-over a lot slower than a mouse. We would never have discovered this rule simply by peering at cultured cells in a petri dish, and indeed, a researcher could easily come to the conclusion that increasing body size will lead to a corresponding increase in metabolic rate.

That sliding scale, said Prof West, is just a simple formula, yet it is one of the fundamental rules that underlies the complexity of life, and similar rules can be found to apply elsewhere. "Wherever there is a physiological variable", he said, "there is a formula." One of these relates to branching, whether it be in blood vessels or in trees. A natural forest, he said, is not just a random bunch of trees, it is a system. Not only is branching being regulated, but while some trees die, and other grow, the overall density and distribution remains the same.

Patterns

Can these sort of rules apply to society? Prof West believes they can, and if we take cities as an example it is possible to find some underlying patterns that are universal to all. We might wonder how Cork could possibly be a scaled up version of Limerick, and Dublin a scaled up version of Cork. Quite obviously they are not the same, they each have a character and ambience of their own, yet, as Prof West pointed out, animals are also diverse, so we should not give up hope of making sense of urban sprawl.

With cities, one of the apparent universals is that wages go up with size, as does the efficiency of infrastructure. In some ways this is easy to understand. Less hospitals, schools, roads and filling stations are needed per person. If that has you heading for the big smoke, think again, because the rise in income is matched by a rise in sickness and crime, and as Prof West pointed out there is a much darker side to city life. With the drift into the cities, which are getting bigger and bigger, there has been an alarming increase in energy consumption. That, in turn, brings us back to the universal rule underlying metabolism.

That sliding rule, explained Prof West, makes life every efficient. Life is remarkably good at conserving energy, and in our unadorned native state, humans fit very neatly into the scale between mice and elephants. At rest, all we consume is the equivalent of a single 100 watt bulb, and with exercise that might only rise to 250 or 300 watts. This is the amount of energy we need to sustain growth and stay alive, and throughout human history this is all we needed until we cleverly started to change, or perhaps even break, the rules.

To cut a long story short, by externalising our consumption, we now burn along on the equivalent of 11,000 watts and in metabolic terms that should make us bigger than a blue whale. Prof West, commenting that "we have really managed to screw things up" wondered where that accelerating trend might end. The indications, he said, are not so good, and he referred back to some of the universals he has found underlying city growth. The impression we get of living in the fast lane, he said, has a basis in fact. People in big cities do walk faster.

Given that society can be looked upon as complex systems, Prof West wondered if we can discover the underlying rules that would enable us to predict, and if necessary, control growth. The way it seems to work now, he said, is that innovation keeps us growing. First we had the axe and fire, then iron, agriculture, steam, the industrial revolution, and with each major discovery there was a giant leap in population.

With each leap forward, we changed the ground rules, and in effect humanity started up all over again, and continued to increase until the resources started to run short. The message here, said Prof West, seems to be that the only way we can keep growing, is to keep on innovating, and what makes him worry, is that the gap between major innovations is narrowing. It took thousands of years to go from stone axe to iron, it took less than a 100 years to go from steam to oil, and now each one of us is likely to live through two major innovations within a lifetime.

Not that Prof West wanted to come across as a banner waving messenger of doom, but he did make the point that it might be a good idea to know where we going.

Freedom

Prof West pointed out that academic life can leave a lot to be desired. For many researchers, he said, universities can become a prison, and like most prisons, the rewards, pay and advancement, are usually given out for good behaviour rather than disruptive originality.

Prof West, who did his primary degree in Cambridge, and has a PhD from Stanford, established the high energy physics group at Los Almos National Laboratory before heading up the Santa Fe Institute. The Institute, often seen as a safe haven for researchers who want to throw off their academic shackles, is no holiday camp. As Prof West explained, the scientists who come there are highly motivated, and the last thing they want is a vacation. They go because they want to work.

The Institute was established about 25 years ago, when a small group of prominent scientists, three of them Nobel Laureates, becoming dissilusioned with what they saw as the progressive ossification of the academic system, decided that they would have to do something about the situation. All had experienced intense frustration in their attempts to cross academic lines. For example, explained Prof West, when one of them wanted to extend his knowledge of physics into economics, he was given to understand that if he did so, he would no longer be accepted as a full member of the physics department.

Of course, life has moved on in the quarter of a century since these scientists decided to strike out for academic freedom, but the Santa Fe Institute, said Prof West, can take a lot of credit for changing attitudes that have led to the growth of inter-disciplinary studies.

The Institute, said Prof West, has always been careful to maintain its independence, and that means accepting no more than 35 per cent of its funding from the government and holding off the advances of bigger universities. Becoming a department within an established university, he said, would defeat the whole reason for their existence. Far better, he maintains, to be poor, by American standards, and free.

Most of the annual $11 million budget comes from a mix of foundations, wealthy people, and companies, and as Prof West commented, "we are lean and mean." There is a small staff, lots of visitors, and no tenure. Researchers who hide in the lab are not welcome, they are expected to mix and interact, and when their work is done, they leave.

"When I was 18," said Prof West, "this is what I thought a university should be," a place where the unfettered mind could be allowed soar to dizzy heights. As he admits, the reality was not quite like that. "Now that I am a good few years older," he said, "I regard myself as very lucky to have finally arrived at a place like the Santa Fe Institute."

Curiously enough, considering that the researchers are more interested in abstract ideas than concrete products, commercially driven companies are among the biggest contributors to the budget. The secret, said Prof West, is that they are smart enough to know that inspiration eventually gets reflected in the bottom line. The rich are also quite willing to part with money, and while Prof West commented that "I spend a lot of my time on bended knee," he likes the idea that he's helping these people to buy academic independence.