Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "biology"

Review and Author Suggestions— Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology
(Ricard Solé and Brian Goodwing, New York: Basic Books, 2000.)

This book is a comprehensive review, showing biological systems as examples of complexity. As writers, when we understand what it means to be complex, we gain a valuable perspective on human life that can drive our character development and plotting. (Mathematical treatments of the problems are set off in separate boxes from the text, which leaves the book accessible to non-scientists.

Solé and Goodwin define complexity as the difference between two independent systems when they modify each other. They exhibit power laws (few big events and progressively more events as things get smaller), nonlinearity, collective behavior, fractal structure, unpredictability and random fluctuations that result in symmetry-breaking. The authors then review the workings of complexity in everything from genes to traffic jams. the genes' roles, they say, are to stabilize patterns of emergent complexity.

In studying emergence, the authors stress that it is essential to study details of the parts as well as high-level dynamics. One example is the fact that brain patterns and cardiac disease with orderly patterns are indicative of disease. Chaos indicated health, health being an emergent phenomenon of the body.

Another discussion reflects Stuart Kaufmann's observations that natural selection works with self-organization in biology, resulting in evolution. this is a nice analogy for human interactions that could drive a story.

Two mechanisms of the origin of life could also suggest plots--closed chains of reactions among cooperating individuals and random reactions between people who network.

Don't let the scientific jargon throw you. A lot of complexity definitions could be labeled simple common sense. Scientists don't like the fact that unpredictability looms large in complex systems, which is great news for us writers. For more details, definitions and examples of complex phenomena, see my notes compiled from a course for nonscientists I taught a few years ago. There on my web site http://caryneeper.com.

A remarkable book in its thorough questioning as Lane makes his case that we are all alike, except our friends and enemies the bacteria and archaea. Plants, animals, humans, fungi and protists all share similar cells--the eukaryotes--which were able to evolve into complex beings, unlike the bacteria and archaea, which got stuck in their successful niches, expanding but not changing much.

Lane explains in detail why the first living beings on Earth probably got going in the alkaline hydrothermal vents deep in the oceans. There is where energy could drive what was needed. Then came symbiosis to some simple living cells--they engulfed and shared genes and energy talents with mitochondria and (probably later) chloroplasts. As a result, they became more and more complex over the ages.

Lanes' exciting theories are well worth the effort, reading along with the bioenergy-thought processes he believes gave us this precious life. Full review at http://astronaut.com/whos-life-may-rare/