A Third Window: Natural Life Beyond Newton and Darwin - Softcover

Ulanowicz, Robert W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159947154X ISBN 13: 9781599471549

Publisher: Templeton Foundation Press,U.S., 2009

Synopsis

Thus far, the dominant paradigms through which modern scientists have viewed nature have been structured primarily around Newtonian and Darwinian approaches. As theoretical ecologist Robert E. Ulanowicz observes in his new work, A Third Window, neither of these models is sufficient for explaining how real change-in the form of creative advance or emergence-takes place in nature.

The metaphysical foundations laid by these great thinkers centuries ago are ill suited to sustain today's search for a comprehensive description of complex living systems. Ecosystem dynamics, for example, violate each and every one of the Newtonian presuppositions. Hence, Ulanowicz offers his titular "third window"-a new way of understanding evolution and other natural processes beyond the common mechanistic or materialistic philosophies of nature.

Drawing on the writings of Walter Elsasser, Karl Popper, Gregory Bateson, Robert Rosen, and Alfred North Whitehead, as well as his own experience as a theoretical ecologist, Ulanowicz offers a new set of axioms for how nature behaves. Chance and disarray in natural processes are shown to be necessary conditions for real change. Randomness is shown to contribute richness and autonomy to the natural world. The metaphysical implications of these new axioms will lend A Third Window a wide appeal not only among scientists, but also among philosophers, theologians, and general readers who follow the science and religion dialogue. Ulanowicz's fresh perspective adds a new voice to the discussion.

About this title

About the Author

Robert E. Ulanowicz was appointed professor emeritus after thirty-eight years with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Maryland. He is author of Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology and Ecology, the Ascendant Perspective. Ulanowicz was awarded the 2007 Ilya Prigogine Medal from the Wessex Institute and the University of Siena for outstanding research in the field of ecological systems.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Third Window

Natural Life beyond Newton and Darwin

By Robert E. Ulanowicz

Templeton Foundation Press

Copyright © 2009 Robert E. Ulanowicz
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59947-154-9

Contents

Foreword by Stuart A. Kauffman.............................................
ix
Preface....................................................................
xix
1. Introduction............................................................
1
2. Two Open Windows on Nature..............................................
13
3. How Can Tings Truly Change?.............................................
40
4. How Can Tings Persist?..................................................
57
5. Agency in Evolutionary Systems..........................................
91
6. An Ecological Metaphysic................................................
115
7. Te View out the Window..................................................
150
Notes......................................................................
169
References.................................................................
173
Name Index.................................................................
185
Subject Index..............................................................
189

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

"If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are andwhat other people are has got to be restructured.... If we continueto operate on the premises that were fashionable in the pre-cyberneticera, ... we may have twenty or thirty years before thelogical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us."

—Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

A Self-Destructive Avenue?

The late Gregory Bateson seemed convinced that society is ona suicidal course and that we can be saved only by eschewingour modernist hubris in favor of "an ecology of mind." In effect,Bateson was arguing that the fundamental assumptions thatsupport how we presume the world to function are categoricallywrong—not simply askew or in need of amplification or clarification—butoutright wrong! His assertion surely will strikemany readers as preposterous. A look in any direction at anytime over the past three centuries reveals major advances andbenefits that have accrued to society from adopting the scientific,rationalist perspective. How could such marvels possiblyhave derived from mistaken foundations? How could continuingto look at the world through the same helpful lens possiblylead us astray? Surely, Bateson was delusional!

But Bateson may seem delusional only because his view ofnature originated from within the scientific community. As C. P.Snow (1963) observed, society is pretty much divided into twocultures with clashing opinions as to whether science affords abeneficial window on reality. Any number of writers, romanticists,and humanists have warned society over the years thatthe scientific viewpoint illumines only the road to perdition,and, for many, the horrors of the twentieth century proved thatpoint. Goethe (1775) even went as far in Urfaustus as to compareplacing one's faith in the Newtonian approach with sellingone's soul to Evil. More recently, this attitude has drawn succorfrom postmodern deconstructivists such as Feyerabend (1978).So Bateson has quite a bit of company, it would seem. Whatdistinguished Bateson from most of his fellow critics, however,was that he set out to construct a rational, alternative picture ofnature.

That ecology played such a prominent role in Bateson's alternativeis highly significant. To be sure, the ever-burgeoning catalogof ecological ills could be taken as part of the very declinethat Bateson had prophesied, and he was grieved by these naturalmaladies. But Bateson made abundantly clear his distancefrom the attitude that "technological thinking caused the problems;technology can solve them." Such would represent whatBateson called a "pathology of epistemology" (Bateson 1972,478). Rather, he was calling for a complete overhaul of how welook at the world, one informed by the image of the ecosystemrather than that of a machine. During his lifetime, he madeprogress toward articulating this new direction by invokingthe nascent science of cybernetics and showing how counterintuitivephenomena could be understood in terms of indirecteffects resulting from feedbacks and the connectedness that ischaracteristic of ecological systems.

Bateson was daring in his suggestion that nature was dualistic,albeit not in the sense of Descartes. Borrowing (perhapsunadvisedly) from Jung's neo-Gnostic vocabulary, Bateson identifiedas pleroma those entities that were homogeneous, continuousand governed by matter and energy—the normal "stuff" ofscience. Living systems and similar physical analogs that werecharacterized more by individual differences (information) andreflexive actions he called "creatura." Although he eschewed thetranscendental, he nonetheless despaired of how the modernmind-set denies one access to the "sacred" in the natural worldaround us (Bateson and Bateson 1987). Despite these contributions,it cannot be said that Bateson achieved a full descriptionof what, for want of a better term, might be called an "ecologicalmetaphysic." It is my aim in this book to continue Bateson'sagenda and to suggest a complete but rational replacement forthose foundations that first initiated and subsequently sustainedthe scientific revolution. This latest revolution is a call to rationalmetanoia, a thoroughgoing conversion of mind.

Bateson sensed that ecology was not merely a derivative science,one wholly dependent on physics and chemistry for itsexplanations. Rather, to him ecology afforded a truly differentway of perceiving reality. Others have sensed that ecology is fundamentallya different endeavor. Arne Naess (1988), for example,emphasized that ecology was "deep," and he purported thatencounters with the ecological affect one's life and perceptionof the natural world in profound and ineffable ways. Jørgensenet al. (2007) likewise point to a number of attributes of ecosystemsthat deviate from the conventional and prefigure the discussionthat will follow. The complexity of ecological dynamicshas prompted some investigators to recognize the necessity forcomplementary narratives of the same phenomena (Jørgensen1992). Even outside the discipline, there are those who recognizethat ecology offers special insights into other natural andeven artificial phenomena: witness, for example, books on the"ecology of computational systems" (Huberman 1988) or theestablishment of institutes devoted to the "ecological study ofperception and action" (Gibson 1979).

Ecology, the Propitious Theater

What, then, is so special about ecology, and is it indeed as ineffableas Naess would have us believe? I hope I am not spoilingthe plot when I state at this early stage that a penetrating readof ecology reveals that it completely inverts the conventionalassumptions about how things happen in the natural world.Furthermore, while recognizing the essential mystery surroundingall things living, I would submit that the reasons that ecologyis so special are nowise as ineffable as Naess contended. It ispossible to identify in perfectly rational fashion where, how, andwhy ecosystems behaviors depart from conventional dynamics(Ulanowicz 1999a) and to use those essential differences to builda more logical and coherent perspective on the phenomenon oflife than can possibly be achieved by looking through the Newtonianglasses.

As the title of this book suggests, I am proposing that, ifwe are to understand and to survive, it becomes necessary toopen a new window upon reality—a third window, so to speak.Without ignoring contributions out of antiquity, one couldargue that the first modern window on nature was framed bykey figures, such as Hobbes, Bacon, Descartes, and especiallyNewton, during the era leading up to the Enlightenment. As weshall argue, what one sees out this window was shaped largelyby the ideas of Plato and the Eleatic school of fundamentalessences. The second window signaled a shift from "law" to"process" and introduced secular history into the scientific narrative.It was opened in two stages, first by Sadi Carnot (1824)and again later by Charles Darwin (1859).

In contrast to these first two windows, the third panorama,that of ecology, has opened more gradually and, some wouldsay, more fitfully. Ecology arose in the latter nineteenth centuryas certain ideas originating in the then-burgeoning field ofphysiology were extended beyond the scale of individual organisms.It took a particularly radical (some would say, subversive)turn during the early twentieth century when American FredericClements (1916) described ecological communities as akinto organisms. (Clements' detractors are wont to focus upon hischance and somewhat offhanded comment that ecosystems canbe regarded as "superorganisms.") Clements' hint that top-downinfluence might be at work in communities did not at all sit wellwith conventional thinking, and a contemporary of Clements,one Henry Gleason (1917), countered that ecological ensemblescome into being more by chance than by existing regularities.Gleason's view eventually supplanted Clements' during the 1950s,when society focused emphasis upon the action of individuals(Hagen 1992).

Clementsian notions were never entirely eliminated fromecology, however. G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1948), at about thetime that cybernetics came into vogue, pointed to circularconfigurations of causal action as being a key driver behindsystem-level behavior in ecosystems. In making the case forcircular causality, Hutchinson drew upon the work of one ofhis students, Raymond Lindeman (1942), who gave didacticform to interrelationships within ecosystems by portrayingthem as networks of transfers of material and energy. Lindeman'sgraphical approach to ecosystem dynamics was adoptedand elaborated by another of Hutchinson's students, HowardT. Odum (1971), who also echoed Hutchinson's opinion thatthe role played by reward loops in ecosystem development is ahighly significant one.

Backing into a New Road

It was precisely this heady mix of whole-system behavior, stochasticity,cybernetics, and networks, as attractively summarizedby Eugene and Howard Odum (1959) in their populartextbook Fundamentals of Ecology, that first beckoned me andso many other physical scientists to become systems ecologists.To me, ecology seemed such a vibrant and fecund domain incomparison with the nonliving systems that had been my preoccupationas a chemical engineer. Still, it remained a ratherinchoate brew to me, and I daresay even to the leading thinkersof the time, as we will see with Bateson. I would like to claimthat all these elements fell rapturously into place during oneflashing moment of insight, but it did not happen that way.There was a decisive moment, but, rather than being one ofinsight, it came as a singular juxtaposition of several ideas thatled to an exciting phenomenological discovery. Phenomenology,as used in science, means the encapsulation of regularities intoa quantitative formula, achieved in abstraction of any elicitingcauses. Hence, phenomenology does not imply understanding,although it often leads in that direction.

I had the good fortune to read two papers in close succession(Atlan 1974; Rutledge, Basorre, and Mulholland 1976) thattogether provided me with a method to quantify the degree oforganization inherent in any collection (network) of interactingprocesses. This discovery itself proved to be highly usefulfor assessing the status of an ecosystem, but there was more.The mathematics used to quantify organization was borrowedfrom the discipline of information theory. The measurementof information is accomplished in a strange, converse fashionwhereby, in order to assess how much is known about a situation,it is first necessary to quantify its opposite, i.e., how muchis unknown. (See chapter 5 in Ulanowicz 1986.) Thus it was thatmy utilitarian search for a measure of dynamical order broughtme into contact with a way of parsing reality that has significantphilosophical implications: using information theory, itbecomes possible to decompose the complexity of any scenariointo two separate terms, one that appraises all that is orderedand coherent about the system and a separate one that encompassesall that is disordered, inefficient, and incoherent withinit. Furthermore, the mathematics of the decomposition revealsthat these two features are strictly complementary. That is,under most conditions, an increase in either implies a decreasein the other. This agonism revealed for me a fundamental featureof reality that remains absent from virtually all scientificnarratives, namely, that nature cannot be regarded in monistfashion. Overwhelmingly, scientists concentrate on elucidatingthe rules that give rise to order and coherence, but, in complexsituations (such as living systems), such explication is neverindependent of the related dynamics of chance and arbitraryphenomena.

These considerations about the dual nature of reality willbe discussed in greater detail toward the end of chapter 4; sufficeit for now to remark that they are cogent to Bateson's (1972,164) dismay over our usual approach to problem solving. Ourcontemporary predilection is to define a problem, formulatea desired endpoint, and then calculate in monist fashion howmost directly to achieve that endpoint. All this is attemptedwithout regard for the dynamics of countervailing aleatoricphenomena, the effects of which propagate over the same networkof relationships as do the dynamics that build structure.Everyone is familiar with the unexpected and/or counterintuitiveresults that can occur when one neglects indirect causalpathways within a complex network of interactions: for example,the DDT used to kill agricultural pests winds up decimatingpopulations of predatory birds. To a degree, such indirecteffects can be written into the monist calculus of contemporaryproblem solving. What is more subtle, however, and absentfrom the conventional approach is the necessary and somewhatparadoxical role that chance and disarray play in the persistenceof complex systems, because, without them, a systemlacks the flexibility necessary to adapt and becomes defenselessin the face of novel perturbation. This relationship between thecomplementary dynamics of organization and chance is akinto a Hegelian dialectic. They remain antagonistic within theimmediate domain, but they become mutually dependent overthe larger realm. Our inclination under the monist approach isto drive the aleatoric to extinction, but to do so beyond a certainpoint is to guarantee disaster.

Turning Around and Going Forward

If we wish to avoid a bad end, then maybe, just maybe, weshould pause and reconsider our directions. The foregoing considerationssuggest that we may harbor an inadequate or inaccurateimage of reality, and so we might begin by scrutinizing our(mostly unspoken) assumptions concerning how nature acts.Although a legion of books is available describing the scientificmethod, works that elaborate and critique the underlying postulates(metaphysics) of conventional science remain scarce bycomparison. This book is an attempt to help redress that imbalance.As the first step toward correcting this bias, I will attemptin the next chapter to delineate the assumptions that frame thetwo great windows through which we currently regard physicalreality—the Newtonian and Darwinian worldviews. Withrespect to the Darwinian narrative, I will argue in favor of thelittle heralded shift whereby Darwin's focus on indeterminate"process" effectively replaced the Newtonian concept of "law"as regards living systems. I will argue further that neither windowprovides an adequate resolution of the complementary(conflicting) questions "How do things change?" and "How dothings persist?"

If the conclusion that the conventional windows do not providean adequate aspect on the world seems too pessimistic tosome readers, I would ask them to be patient. This book is notan antiscience screed. In the chapters to follow, I will attempt toconstruct a rational basis for what I consider to be a more realisticapproach to the study of living systems. Should that goalsound ridiculous and hubristic to some, I would beg them considerthe precedent set by Tellegen's theorem in thermodynamics(Mickulecky 1985). Bernard Tellegen worked with networkthermodynamics, where systems of processes are representedas networks. Each node in the net is characterized by a potential(such as voltage or pressure), while the transfers connectingthe nodes (the arcs or links) are quantified by the magnitude ofthe associated flow (amps, m3/s, respectively). In the conventionalview, agency resides in the nodes, and flows are drivenfrom nodes of higher potential to those with lower values. Thus,electrical current flows in a radio circuit at the behest of the differencesin electrical potential (voltage) between components,while drinking water flows in a municipal distribution networkin response to differences in hydraulic pressure.

Tellegen discovered that, whenever the relationships betweenpotentials and flows are strictly linear, system dynamics becomeentirely symmetrical as regards the potentials and the flows. Thatis, nodes and flows become completely interchangeable; there isno reason that flows cannot be considered to be the causes ofthe given potentials. From this perspective, the convergence ofelectrical currents drives up the potential at that intersection(node). Water pressure may rise at an intersection of lines in amunicipal system because water is arriving there faster than itis flowing away. In brief, Tellegen showed that throughout therealm of linear dissipative systems, there are always two identicaland inverse (dual) perspectives on the same problem.

Of course, ecology is hardly a linear world, and no one shouldexpect to achieve a fully equivalent description of ecosystembehavior by considering flows as causes. This is not as much ofa loss as it first seems, however, because full equivalence wouldactually provide no new insights. If, however, a description of anonlinear system should become possible whereby flows serveas causes, it follows that the ensuing picture would differ (possiblymarkedly so) from the one drawn with the focus on objects.Furthermore, those differences would not have been visiblethrough the conventional lens. The new perspective affords theopportunity to view situations that are wholly new. Such a newvision is exactly what I am trying to convey in this book: analternative (dual) description of our natural world can indeedbe made in terms of processes as causes.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Templeton Foundation Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159947154X
• ISBN 13: 9781599471549
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224