Steven Wells
Self-Organization in Science and Society, Prof. Eglash
3/2/2014
Reading Reflection Paper #1
Learning about fractals (or anything of the sort) was the furthest thing from my thoughts when I
was applying for classes in college. However, now that I am learning about them and how often they
appear to us in nature and in society, I am beginning to look at certain things differently now. Through
the book “---“ by “” [Complexity! How hard is it to remember that?] Mitchel and several online articles,
I have gained a deeper insight to the world of complexity and fractals. It will be hard for me to expound
upon one idea so I thought that I would briefly re-touch upon a lot of what we have discussed in class.
At first the text was difficult to comprehend, but Mitchell’s book helped clear things up. Mitchell
started out by defining the term “complexity" in the section of chapter seven titled, “Complexity as
Fractal Dimension”. I like how Mitchell explains how to measure complexity as well as how to look indepth into complexity through various perspectives. “The classic example of a fractal is a coastline. If
you view a coastline from an airplane, it typically looks rugged rather than straight, with many inlets,
bays, prominences and peninsulas. If you then view the same coastline from your car on the coast
highway, it still appears to have the same kind of ruggedness but on a smaller scale.” (Mitchell, p.
103). Even though this might be obvious to us anyway, this fractal example teaches us about “selfsimilarity”. By looking at the coastline from different perspectives and magnitudes of depth, we can see
the mini version of the larger fractal design and how complicated and complex this earthly feature can
be.
The second chapter by Mitchell was very insightful and one that I can honestly say gave me a
pretty good understanding of the topic after reading it. I thought the author made some good points
and expressed some good examples on Chaos theory and the history of the Logistic Map (population
growth rates with 1:1 and 2:2 ratios with rabbits living on an island(s)). An idea came to mind after
reading this chapter and I thought that our world could be in both chaos and order at the same time. It
is impossible to predict what's going to happen next but we have a system (government or something
else) to help us fix the potential outcome of the situation to create order after something does happen.
In chapters eight, nine, and ten, Mitchell covers some important topics. Chapter eight was about
Self Reproducing Computer Programs and posed a great question at the beginning of the section: what
is life? Like I stated in out discussion I had trouble at first following Mitchel’s description of programming
a computer and then quickly realized how hard programming a computer can be. Diving into the SelfOrganization part of this course, Mitchel introduced Von Neumann, who was one of the first scientists to
deeply think about the connections between computations and biology and spent the last years of his
life solving the problem of creating a self-reproducing machine with a self-copying program. Chapter
nine took on Genetic Algorithms. I found that this section tied along with chapter eight in that GA’s help
make the self-reproducing computers, and programming computers in general, possible. The example of
Robby, the Soda Can Collecting Robot, helped clarify how GA’s and different strategies can help program
machines to virtually make no mistakes by trial and error and taking the data that was already collected
and computing all of the data together to make the logical next move. Chapter ten was about Cellular
Automata, Life, and the Universe. Overall, this reading definitely made you think about the
advancements that are being made to, in some way, make manual labor disappear by programming
machines to take care of everyday tasks is phenomenal.
In chapter twelve, I think Mitchell’s example of the human Immune system described as a
complex system was a good example of information processing in living systems. As well as the ant
colony analogy and how there isn’t just one ant that is in charge; rather every ant contributes to the
function of the entire colony (i.e. foraging food and whatever other needs that ant colony has). I also
found the “Information Acquire Meaning?” section to be interesting as well. Mitchell describes this as
“Events that happen to an organism means something to that organism if those events affect its wellbeing or reproductive abilities. In short, the meaning of an event tells one how to respond.” (Mitchell,
p. 184). I think the author’s statement here explains itself. How we chose to react depends on the type
of situation we are in and how much that’s situation has relevance or meaning to us.
Alongside all of the readings from Mitchel, we also read various articles that helped us gain a
better understanding of the material. From the February third discussion, I read both of the beginner
articles in Economics and Social Science. In the Economics article the author compared the Koch
Snowflake and its jaggedness to the economic status of New York probably because of how much
money comes in and out of New York every day. But I do understand how the author describes a fractal
by using the example of New York and the world. “We are going to go from Global to the US to the
New York City metro area to the neighborhood of NYU in Manhattan. At each scale there is a
remarkably high level of inequality across space.” (Easterly). The author states that the most obvious
answer to inequality is exactly wrong: redistribution “would destroy incentives for wealth creations and
make everyone worse off.” (Easterly). In retrospect, the author is relaying the economy and wealth to
poverty as like a fractal. I think what the author is saying here is that there are some many jagged edges
in the economy that if one thing were to change, then the rest would change and you will still see a reoccurring pattern wherever you go. [this is where your next paragraph should have started] The
second article, the beginner in Social Science was called “The Broken Past: Fractals in Archaeology”. The
author states that many archaeologists have studied and found patterns in many of their finding but
have not recognized them as fractals but just very complex and irregular patterns. The overall main
purpose for this article is to show how working professional archaeologists should rethink their analysis
on their findings and use fractal analysis instead to get a better more accurate picture of what they are
looking at. The main points that this article covers are: 1) Fractals are ubiquitous in archaeological
datasets, 2) Fractals properly yield important results, and 3) Fractal geometry has significant theoretical
implications. I believe that the article covers a lot of the same ideas that were brought up in the first
video we had watched in class as well.
From the February tenth discussion on the article about Chaos from Hofstadter really helped me
understand Chaos theory and attractors from more of a mathematical viewpoint. He used an example of
cars on a multilane highway to descried the relationship between hydrodynamic flow and,( more in
depth, laminar flow) and turbulent flow having something to do with the iteration of folded equations,
chaotic regime and period doubling. “In a peacefully flowing fluid, the flow is laminar, a soft and
gentle word that means that all of the molecules in the fluid are moving like cars on a multilane
highway.” (Hofstadter, p. 375). The key feature that the reading brought up were: 1) Each car will flow
on the same path as its predecessor and 2) With two cars near each other, whether they are in the same
lane as each other or different lanes, will, as time passes, will gradually distance themselves essentially
in proportion to the difference in each car’s velocity assuming they are linear. With turbulent flow, the
word turbulent itself sounds much harsher than laminar. Instead of having linear streamlines for the
molecules to move on, the streamlines (laminas) are separated and are tangled rather than linear.
In the discussion on February 13th, I had agreed with the political scientists, Font and Regis, on
their 2006 overview of Chaos theory’s applicability to political science. I thought about international
relations having an effect on bringing or suppressing chaos in terms of bringing about peace. I amend
my statement from the discussion by saying this: I completely agree that by increasing entropy, this will
bring more peace even to the most ordered and disordered of countries (to a certain respect) Too much
or too little could be very bad.
In the article, “Waldrop’s Secret of the Old One”, Waldrop talks about complexity and chaos. He
also talks about an important topic that Stuart Kauffman contemplated on: genetic circuits. “It is the
computing behavior - the orderly behavior - of this entire system that somehow governs how one cell
can become different from another.” “The question is How?” (Waldrop, p. 106). Kauffman later goes on
to say that most researchers at the time were too concerned about how this could be relevant to
computation and programming. I also feel that Kauffman was onto a promising theory that if somehow
he could figure out how to uncover the genetic regulatory network that controls cell development the
result could give us the power to control cell differentiation and cell death, apoptosis. I began to think
about various types of cancer treatment that would be great examples for this.
When I read the article on Self-Organized Criticality and Sand piles, it was to my understanding
that you couldn’t predict when the avalanches on the sand piles would happen, no matter what this size
of the pile was. Held couldn’t understand why when his colleagues and he increased the size of the base
of the pile (from four to eight centimeters), the pile would only produce big avalanches. In short, the size
of these sand piles doesn’t show self-organized criticality. Only the smaller sand piles do because they
can produce both large and small avalanches.
I believe there is still a lot more to learn about Self-Organization in Science and Society than we
have already learned so far and I look forward to hearing about the different areas of research that are
involved with this topic.
Well written, great ideas. Needed better structure for one paragraph. Grade = A
Bibliography
1) Mitchell, Melanie. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
2) Easterly, William. "Beautiful Fractals and Ugly Inequality." Aid Watch Beautiful Fractals and
Ugly Inequality Comments. N.p., 09 Sept. 2010. Web. 03 Feb. 2014.
3) Hofstadter, Douglas R. "Mathematical Chaos and Strange Attractors." Metamagical Themas:
Questioning for the Essence of Mind and Matter. N.p.: n.p., 1981. 363-95. Print.
4) Waldrop, M. Mitchell. "Chapter 3: Secrets of The Old One." Complexity. N.p.: Simon &
Schuster, n.d. 99-135. Print.