Complexity and the Arrow of Time
Charles H. Lineweaver, Paul C.W. Davies, and Michael Ruse, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2013. v + 357 pp. $31.95 (hardback).
This book arises from a symposium entitled, “Is there a General Principle of Increasing Complexity?”, held at the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona St. University in 2010, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. There is a widespread belief, the entire world over, that the universe in general, and life in particular, is getting more and more complex as time passes. The fourteen chapters of this book bring together thirteen different authors, whose expertise is either in science, philosophy or theology. Together, these essays explore notions of complexity, essential problems behind the theory, and the role of life within it. In so doing, they answer such questions as, What is complexity?, When and why does it increase?, Is the universe evolving necessarily toward greater expressions of it?, and if so, what is the source of this universal increase? From a multi-disciplinary prospective, this title provides key insights toward answering the above questions.
Traditional reductionistic accounts of science, though they have gotten us this far, ultimately cannot account for the complexity that we encounter in everyday phenomena, of which biology is the most obvious example. Indeed, the techniques of particle physics and cosmology fail to describe the nature, origin, and extent of biological complexity. Darwinian evolution, though capable of describing how biological complexity arose, is unable to address why it arose. In biological evolution, complexity seems to forever rise, yet the trend is hard to pin down exactly.
In the first section of this book, consisting of five chapters, physicists attempt to make a definition of complexity that can be measured and is transdisciplinary; they want to provide a method for measuring complexity. After all, the physicists contend, without a unified definition that permits cross-disciplinary speculations on complexity are moot. Biologists, however, in their five chapters of Part III, are a little more comfortable with working without a unified definition, for first there were bacteria, and there is New York, so to speak (135). Having introduced the book generally, as a biologist I would now like to go deeper into some individual biologically relevant chapters, highlighting poignant ideas therein.
Simon Conway Morris, in his contribution entitled “Life: the final frontier for complexity?”, begins his discussion with the notion of evolutionary inherency, the idea that much that will be required for the emergence of a complex form has already evolved at a substantially earlier stage; he cites the protein collagen as an example (Collagen is an essential structural molecule in metazoans, but whose origins lie deeper in eukaryotic history with evidently quite different functions; also note that the choanoflagellate, Monosiga, is single-celled and its collagen has no structural role whatsoever). At the end of his chapter, he presents evidence that at least some biological systems are near, or even have reached, the upper bunds of complexity (e.g., extremophiles, certain nervous systems, and enzymes such as Rubisco). Much of what Conway Morris has to say redounds from his readings from the research on convergence. So far as nervous systems are concerned, an end point is the human brain; but if alien life is ever discovered, Conway Morris notes, this assertion may have to be revisited (139).
In his chapter, entitled “Evolution beyond Newton, Darwin, and entailing law: the origin of complexity in the evolving biosphere, Stuart Kauffman’s large aim is to take us from the received, static worldview of Newton, into the partially unknowable world of becoming in which the evolving world co-creates its own possibilities of becoming (162). Notably, Kauffman agrees with Conway Morris that convergence is powerful, but disagrees with him that any possible saturation has occurred in the biological morphospace; he contends that this assertion remains an open question.
Eric Smith, in chapter nine (“Emergent order in processes: the interplay of complexity, robustness, correlation, and hierarchy in the biosphere”), argues that phase transition continues to be the appropriate paradigm in which to understand the emergence of the biosphere on Earth, and that at least some universal patterns in life should be understood as what are called the order parameters of one or more such transitions (191). He contends, however, that the phase transitions that formed the biosphere are dynamical transitions rather than equilibrium transitions.
In Michael Ruse’s contribution to the text, he offers a few remarks about complexity (and progress, that ever-loathed word) as they play out in evolutionary biology. He notes that in the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain, there were two competing views of evolutionary thought. One was expressed by Charles Darwin and his inner circle, while the other was asserted by Herbert Spencer and fellow Spencerians. Ruse asserts that the major differences between Darwin and Spencer was their difference of opinion over the notions of complexity, in a large sense. Ruse suggests that Darwin’s thinking on the matter is more faithfully adhered to in Britain, whereas Spencer’s is in North America, at least assuredly so in the Victorian era (280).
Even after all the writing has been done in this volume, the editors acknowledge, forthrightly, that they have not resolved the questions of: What is complexity? Is it increasing? – but that they have made their (and our!) confusion about these questions more explicit. May future writings go forth and explore these ideas regarding complexity more so. All in all, I could easily foresee this title being used in graduate-level philosophy of science courses as a companion text.
Bradford McCall, Regent University