complexity lecture


@Audubon ctr 20kids? parents?

A) collect some ant colonies

B) watch 'em, take notes on what they do. dig, take care of larvae,
take care of queen, move things around find water, sugar, attack
fruit flies, lay trails, greet each other, feed each other, eat
stuff, bring stuff to larvae, settle down at night, clean each other,
clean antennas... 40 activities? 100s of actions?

C) try to key some out under dissection scope. ants have LOTS of
parts! 14+21+6*6+2*14 +2*9 =100 external parts! wait! plus dozens of
hairs, hundreds on the antennae, sensor pits? fine pits and
reticulations on the exoskelleton...

D) can we build ant robots? get some kits with activators, sensors,
logic blocks. try hooking 'em up to get simple robots to move around
and follow lights etc.. how many parts do we need?
get some simple robots working show some more complex ones. you
need LOTS MORE logic blocks and sensors to make interesting robots!
just HOW MANY?

E) let's see how to build an ant:
dissect one under a scope and projector. this would be amazing.
it's really complicated in there. Also have slides of finer
dissections and photomicrographs. each of those joints has its own
muscles, fibers everywhere, nerves, sensors... trachea, stinger and
acid gland, nerves, sensors, each antenna joint filled with hairs and
sensors. learn to count an arrray of hairs, parts of compound eye
facets. find the brain.
see if you can get an ant to move EACH joint, doing some
activity.

any vital stains to see how many neurons? get photo micrographs.
100X100X100 of them? and the connections between!

so how many logic blocks? write some computer programs to
simulate ants! show 'em some sophisticated programs, bot programs.

F) ok, we couldn't figure out how to build an ant! how do ANTS build
ants? how does an ant come from an egg? what's in an egg? how does
mother ant make it?

two aspects: one is from egg > larvae > ant. how is it done?
show stop motion photos of development, cells. seems to be cells
creating each other and laying down systems of fibers and pulling
each other around into shapes and inducing each other into becoming
different cell types and communicating with each other...

just WHAT ARE these cells that they can do so much? and be
factories to make each other?

look at pond water. here are some free living cells. watch
stentor, watch rotifers =1000 cells. watch euglena, a small cell.
they can do as many things as ants can!! almost. cells are
freeliving amazing beings. make a list of activities that cells can
do. also 40 or 50 different activities... WHAT are they?

G) go in deeper: how many parts? look at freeze etch electron
micrographs! organelles, shot through with internal fibers,
membranes, tracks along which proteins can move things along.
sensors on the outside. mitochondria protein factories. 1000
different enzymes. it's chemistry! look at the metabolic wall
chart! YIKES. how much?

look at a city street. count up the bricks in a building,
buildings per block, blocks per city! how many bricks total? how
many people? how many factories? how many professions? A cell has
MORE! even the simplest cell, a bacteria does 40 things, and has
more moving parts than this! it's in constant state of dynamic
motion, taking apart structures and rearranging them into new ones to
meet it's immediate needs from minute to minute.

all the while show how we measure this, how we know how many
molecules.

H) what are these structures? how did we learn it? they are
chemistry! enzymes ar proteiens. even they have building blocks,
they are constructed at ribosomes. 20 diff amino acids. they are
chemistry. they are molecules, they can be counted, you can do
electrophoresis, they can take part in chemical reactions, they can
be built up in laboratory experiments from the simplest chemicals,
elements, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen, hydrogen..
learn some organic chemistry. what kind of components are these
to a living cell factory? learn how responsive one amino acid is to
its environment. how many reactions can it partake in? responds to
pH, hydrophilic/hydrophobic, H-bonding, conformation change, single
double triple bonds, swivel, not swivel...

I) how did we learn to count these atoms? can't barely see them but
other clever ways to count that there are 10^23 of them in a handful!

J) how to build/design ants at all these levels? Second aspect, now
look at all these games:
cell automata games, conway life, linear automata, computer
programs, logic cuircuits,
find some examples of cell auto with random input: interactions of
rules AND random.
Bernard cells, B-Z reaction, minerology to diff static patterns
comprised of a few elements combined. morowitz's and prigogene's
ideas on order out of dissipative systems with energy flow accross
some gradients.
Look at Tierra! how cell automata can EVOLVE!
Lots of math!

How many design cycles might it take?

K) now, don't forget that there are 8000 different species of ants!
we found a dozen or so! what's that all about? and of course birds
dogs cats squirells fish stentor worms on and on, they all can do
these things! What's THAT all about? they designing each other?
and plants, and stentor and fungi and bacteria. how many? show a
classification of 5 kingdoms of 100 different crazy phyla, with
10,000s of families, 20million species? wow!
and remember: we've found that they all seem to work on the same
core of cellular machinery! they are all variations on a theme!
what's THAT about?

L) so how do we design all that?
1) how DOES human creativity work? how have we mistakenly
thought it works, how have freud and jung and psychologist and
artifical intelligence and neurophysiology taught us it works?
2) we are just beginning to learn how to build mechanisms that
can learn, create with trial and error: Tierran, genetic algorithms,
Kaufman nets...
3) we can see that critters get mutations at the genetic level.
we can see some examples of populations of critters splitting due to
reproductive isolation or different food choice.
4) we can imagine at least 3 different kinds of design:
a) trial and error
b) the way we reason things out to work well, efficiently
c) solutions to max min problems mathematically?
5) which way do organisms seem to be designed? they certainly
aren't elegant solutions to maxmin problems, or at least the problems
are so complex that we can't tell. some of them gots parts that
don't seem to be reasoned out so well! vestigal limbs on whales,
appendix, silly routing of nerves and blood vessels in giraffes...
6) and why so many kinds? why 2 kinds of slugs in goshen, and
500 different kinds of fruit flies in hawaiin islands? what's going
on? what kinds of situations were all these designed for? what
kinds of environments have there been? what's the history?

M) well there seems to be a geological history! look at all these
interlocking parts. sediment layers, records of continental drift
and pole shifting recorded in iron minerals. we see mountain
building and subduction. we got radioactive decay of elements.

N) then there are the fossils! they seem to change from layer to
layer and seem to respond to the shifting of continents. there's
geochemical history too, which gives us hints of changing climate...

O) so 150 years ago Darwin and Wallace proposed a simple mechanism
whereby populations of organisms can shape each other over the long
generations of geological time over the earth to develop some
diversity. ALL these other aspects of biology, of design processes,
corroborate with this proposal to suggest that it can indeed result
in speciation of many critters over 2billion years of geological
history in diverse climates.

R) but how to get the first cell? learn organic chemistry. it is
the biggest mystery we have. at the moment we don't knnow how to
proceed from properties of chemistry to the simplest bacteria. we've
only been learning chemistry for 150 years, and only known of the
complexity we need to explain for the past 50 years!!! we are just
begining! this will be an exciting adventure in the next 50 to 150
years!

P) look at the history of this.

30,000 yago we awaken to the world, begin expressing ideas in art
and language and ritual

10,000 yago our populations grow and densify and we begin
agriculture and fishing villages to cities to division of labor to
elaborately written mythological texts

600bce reflective thought processes begin and the religious and
philosophical texts become sophisticated and we start posing basic
questions of how human life and the world works. tora, greek
philosophy, zoroaster.
even aristotle begins to observe the diversity of creatures and
looks into their physiology. he even comes up with a darwinian
theory of evolution but rejects it because he doesn't belive there is
random input. curious.
Lucretius records sophisticated arguments about the possibility
of molecular nature of the world.

16th century europe. science begins in earnest and we really start
OBSERVING and ferreting out how things work on their own standing.

1850 we begin learning of the complexity of molecules, organic
chemistry, darwinian mechanisms of creation

1950 we begin to learn JUST what kind of molecular machines cells
are, how mutation and heredity work. we begin exploring mathematics
and computer science of complexity, cellular automata, and begin
building computers and programms of complexity undreamed of as of
now. Artifical Intelligence begins to explore the possibility of
building from the bottom up programs running on discrete networks of
transistors that are capable of mimicing some of the complex
behaviors of organisms!

S) so we are beginning to see that we CAN make mind out of parts. is
that the ONLY way to get mind? can we truly construct minds as
complex as ants dogs people? This too, is part of our new adventure.
this science is only 50years old!