Further reading on self-organized systems and other ideas
July 1, 2018 2:51 PM Subscribe
About 10 years ago I had a terrific train of though going, following one book to the next. I'd like to pick up that train again, and need some book recommendations.
Here are some of what I remember reading then:
Godel, Escher, Bach and a couple of others, Douglas Hofstader
Vehicles, Valentino Braitenberg
A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander
Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio
A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram
The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose
How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
I guess this was as close as this old secularist would come to a spiritual quest: Where do complexity and order come from? What are the big patterns to which consciousness hews? Or whatever you see in the above books. And yes, popular-science stuff. I suppose I could try more technical works.
A Pattern Language probably blew my mind the most. If there is a book that great that I'm missing, tell me now.
Thanks!
Here are some of what I remember reading then:
Godel, Escher, Bach and a couple of others, Douglas Hofstader
Vehicles, Valentino Braitenberg
A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander
Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio
A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram
The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose
How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
I guess this was as close as this old secularist would come to a spiritual quest: Where do complexity and order come from? What are the big patterns to which consciousness hews? Or whatever you see in the above books. And yes, popular-science stuff. I suppose I could try more technical works.
A Pattern Language probably blew my mind the most. If there is a book that great that I'm missing, tell me now.
Thanks!
Ira Livingston’s Between Science and Literature is a very pleasurable and intellectual book about autopoeisis.
posted by Buddy_Boy at 4:21 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Buddy_Boy at 4:21 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Best answer: As someone who is also interested in complexity, order, and self-organization, I'm tempted to try to convert you to learning about biology, which is where we've been able to explore these ideas in microbiological detail. Plausible bullshit has been mostly been pushed out by solid scientific discoveries (minus some of the evo-psych side of things and the usual gaggle of speculative hangers-on). Instead of filling in the blanks with speculation in order to keep the logical thread together - as most of the books you've listed do - biologists mostly admit when they don't know something.
This can make the ride less thrilling if you get a rush from seeing everything wrapped up in a powerful, logical idea, since there are more places in biology in which we don't even know what needs to be explained than places where we've got it all figured out. On the other hand, most of what you're reading has been subjected to empirical verification and is true.
If you are open to it, here are the more readable books on my shelves:
The Cartoon Guide to Genetics: Made my interest in microbiology take off.
The Machinery of Life: What the crowded world inside the cell looks like, all the proteins crowded together.
Journey to the Ants: You can't talk about self-organization without talking about ants, can you?
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and The Gene: An Intimate History, both by Siddhartha Mukherjee. If you like narrative arc and something less dry and technical, these are for you. Cancer is at that fascinating place where different levels of self-organization are in conflict with each other.
The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology: Much of what we know about psychology and evolution comes from the study of birds. The book also happens to be filled with beautiful illustrations.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo: This is closest in tone to some of the books you list, and there's some really interesting stuff in it about the ways in which all life is tied together as per recent microbiological discoveries.
Some of the textbooks on my shelves; worth reading if you really want to dig into it:
How the Immune System Works: This is probably the slimmest volume you'll find which explains in technical detail how all of the parts of a complex biological system fit together.
Evolutionary Analysis: Has experimental or observational examples for every idea that's introduced, and well-explained math for many of them. Is reasonably up-to-date on rapidly advancing parts of the discipline (e.g. the evolution of social behaviour, sexual selection, evo-devo), and is a pleasant read. Read On the Origin of Species, which is still a tour-de-force, and then read Evolutionary Analysis to catch up.
Evolution: A Developmental Approach: A textbook approach to the questions explored in Endless Forms Most Beautiful. More thorough; many more pictures and graphs; a more sober tone.
Molecular Biology of the Cell: Like reading the entirety of an annotated Bible in order to learn about Christianity, it's a big, dense book to start chewing into. If you're interested in bigger questions instead of smaller questions, you might find yourself skipping to the later chapters on cancer, development, and sex. I found the chapters on cell organization harder going, but they did give me a sense of awe at the intricate systems involved, all the proteins scooting around the cell doing their robot jobs. It made me think of all the complexity of a big city; transportation and processing and decision-making and coordination, with thousands of different jobs being done by millions of individuals. If you want to know in great technical detail what is going on in The Machinery of Life, this is the book. The 5th edition is, as with most previous textbook editions, available for much cheaper. If you know what you're looking for, the 4th edition can be accessed for free by searching.
Molecular Principles of Animal Development: This book is a slog, unless you enjoy keeping track of hundreds of acronyms. However, buried under all the acronyms and excruciating details is a really interesting big idea about how the program that's stored in DNA gets transformed into an animal. I wish there was an easier-to-read book which explained the idea in a readable way. This book is not it.
Based on the books you've listed, I'd suggest Endless Forms Most Beautiful as your starting point if you're intrigued. There are probably better books to follow that one than the ones I've listed; this just happens to be the idiosyncratic course that I've taken into the subject.
posted by clawsoon at 4:54 PM on July 1, 2018 [13 favorites]
This can make the ride less thrilling if you get a rush from seeing everything wrapped up in a powerful, logical idea, since there are more places in biology in which we don't even know what needs to be explained than places where we've got it all figured out. On the other hand, most of what you're reading has been subjected to empirical verification and is true.
If you are open to it, here are the more readable books on my shelves:
The Cartoon Guide to Genetics: Made my interest in microbiology take off.
The Machinery of Life: What the crowded world inside the cell looks like, all the proteins crowded together.
Journey to the Ants: You can't talk about self-organization without talking about ants, can you?
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and The Gene: An Intimate History, both by Siddhartha Mukherjee. If you like narrative arc and something less dry and technical, these are for you. Cancer is at that fascinating place where different levels of self-organization are in conflict with each other.
The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology: Much of what we know about psychology and evolution comes from the study of birds. The book also happens to be filled with beautiful illustrations.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo: This is closest in tone to some of the books you list, and there's some really interesting stuff in it about the ways in which all life is tied together as per recent microbiological discoveries.
Some of the textbooks on my shelves; worth reading if you really want to dig into it:
How the Immune System Works: This is probably the slimmest volume you'll find which explains in technical detail how all of the parts of a complex biological system fit together.
Evolutionary Analysis: Has experimental or observational examples for every idea that's introduced, and well-explained math for many of them. Is reasonably up-to-date on rapidly advancing parts of the discipline (e.g. the evolution of social behaviour, sexual selection, evo-devo), and is a pleasant read. Read On the Origin of Species, which is still a tour-de-force, and then read Evolutionary Analysis to catch up.
Evolution: A Developmental Approach: A textbook approach to the questions explored in Endless Forms Most Beautiful. More thorough; many more pictures and graphs; a more sober tone.
Molecular Biology of the Cell: Like reading the entirety of an annotated Bible in order to learn about Christianity, it's a big, dense book to start chewing into. If you're interested in bigger questions instead of smaller questions, you might find yourself skipping to the later chapters on cancer, development, and sex. I found the chapters on cell organization harder going, but they did give me a sense of awe at the intricate systems involved, all the proteins scooting around the cell doing their robot jobs. It made me think of all the complexity of a big city; transportation and processing and decision-making and coordination, with thousands of different jobs being done by millions of individuals. If you want to know in great technical detail what is going on in The Machinery of Life, this is the book. The 5th edition is, as with most previous textbook editions, available for much cheaper. If you know what you're looking for, the 4th edition can be accessed for free by searching.
Molecular Principles of Animal Development: This book is a slog, unless you enjoy keeping track of hundreds of acronyms. However, buried under all the acronyms and excruciating details is a really interesting big idea about how the program that's stored in DNA gets transformed into an animal. I wish there was an easier-to-read book which explained the idea in a readable way. This book is not it.
Based on the books you've listed, I'd suggest Endless Forms Most Beautiful as your starting point if you're intrigued. There are probably better books to follow that one than the ones I've listed; this just happens to be the idiosyncratic course that I've taken into the subject.
posted by clawsoon at 4:54 PM on July 1, 2018 [13 favorites]
I'm into complexity study from molecular to regional scales and suggest you look back to Turing and then come forward and see where his theories re the underlying drivers of animal form and patterning are going. It's like exploring epigenetics without knowing of genetics and helps you realise that much of what is, may not only be driven by the genome, but by the structure of the surrounding environment and an organism's shape.
Phillip Ball's Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts (3 titles - Flow, Shapes, Branches) is a good way in - "describes in detail how physics and chemistry influence and interweave with evolution (biology) to create patterns and symmetry in nature"
Alan Turing : his work and impact. pub 2013. go to Part IV: The Mathematics of Emergence: The Mysteries of Morphogenesis.
So-called Turing-Patterns seem to be all-the-rage - google scolar 2018 papers. There's some very mind opening ideas in there, right across the knowledge spectrum!
posted by unearthed at 5:52 PM on July 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
Phillip Ball's Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts (3 titles - Flow, Shapes, Branches) is a good way in - "describes in detail how physics and chemistry influence and interweave with evolution (biology) to create patterns and symmetry in nature"
Alan Turing : his work and impact. pub 2013. go to Part IV: The Mathematics of Emergence: The Mysteries of Morphogenesis.
So-called Turing-Patterns seem to be all-the-rage - google scolar 2018 papers. There's some very mind opening ideas in there, right across the knowledge spectrum!
posted by unearthed at 5:52 PM on July 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
Oh yeah Ball is super fun and pretty responsible, I second that as a great work of pop sci.
As for Turing, feel free to start with Turing (1952) on The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, it is short and surprisingly readable compared to much current scholarly output, and will help frame the recent synthetic works listed by unearthed above.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:11 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
As for Turing, feel free to start with Turing (1952) on The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, it is short and surprisingly readable compared to much current scholarly output, and will help frame the recent synthetic works listed by unearthed above.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:11 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Way further down the list: Sugihara's Niche Hierarchy, or Harte's Maximum Entropy and Ecology. There's a lot of math background. I don't think you can get the juice without doing some math. Heck, Shalizi's dissertation.
Way up the list, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, in which he is mostly thinking about geological observations that make enough time for the theory of Descent, but you can also see the naturalism that fed Descent. Also some mild adventure and nearly-anthropology.
Some current experimental work on Turing's biological work.
posted by clew at 10:04 PM on July 1, 2018
Way up the list, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, in which he is mostly thinking about geological observations that make enough time for the theory of Descent, but you can also see the naturalism that fed Descent. Also some mild adventure and nearly-anthropology.
Some current experimental work on Turing's biological work.
posted by clew at 10:04 PM on July 1, 2018
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living
By H.R. Maturana, F. J. Varela
What Is Life?, By Erwin Schrödinger
What Is Life?, By J. B. S. Haldane
posted by at at 5:42 AM on July 2, 2018
By H.R. Maturana, F. J. Varela
What Is Life?, By Erwin Schrödinger
What Is Life?, By J. B. S. Haldane
posted by at at 5:42 AM on July 2, 2018
If you do go down the biology track, one book which you'll inevitably run into is The Selfish Gene. It is a brilliantly-written exposition of a Big Idea, so I think it would be right up your alley as a reading experience. Unfortunately, it has aged about as well as many pop-sci Big Idea books do, and I wouldn't recommend reading it without understanding the ways in which his simple, bold vision has been complicated and sometimes contradicted by what we've learned since then. Messiness and complication rarely make for a good read, but that's what makes Dawkins' logic not quite so logical and the inexorability of his conclusions not quite so inexorable. It takes a spherical cow approach to biology and evolution, and that's where it tends to have unwarranted confidence in its conclusions.
Things I'd suggest understanding before reading The Selfish Gene:
posted by clawsoon at 7:47 AM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
Things I'd suggest understanding before reading The Selfish Gene:
- How phenotypes are built from genotypes, and how that affects the evolution of both. Sometimes genes encode traits, and the simple logic of The Selfish Gene applies. Sometimes, though, protein-encoding genes are small cogs in complex networks of genes and regulators and life histories that build traits, and simple logic to the effect that "genes which encode advantageous traits increase the chance of their own survival" is dispersed in a fog of, "What's 'a gene' in this case, anyway?" For example, read The Making of a Fly, and then think about what trait the Notch genes are "for". What happens to the evolution of a trait when it is heritable but there's no "a gene" which encodes it? (Ironically, Dawkins explains this moderately well himself with a recipe metaphor.) Endless Forms Most Beautiful will also be a good read along these lines.
- Modern theories of group selection. I haven't found a great book about it yet, but D.S. Wilson's blog series Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection, partially indexed here, is the best-written exposition I've found so far. A big part of Dawkins' purpose in writing The Selfish Gene was to slay group selection once and for all, but he seems to be coming around to accepting modern group selection theory so long as it's not called "group selection". Group selection is still controversial, but it is being taken seriously again. (Further out on the fringes, there are even some theoretical biologists reviving the zombie corpse of Wynne-Edwards, whose theories Dawkins was most proud of demolishing in The Selfish Gene.)
- The limitations of the math that The Selfish Gene is based on. It comes to the conclusion that altruism is possible among genes which are inherited together, but extremely unlikely to arise among unrelated individuals. It comes to this conclusion in large part because the math which it is so brilliantly expounding assumes infinite population sizes and random assortment. Once you use more realistic assumptions, you find that altruism is much easier to evolve. I haven't yet read any of Martin Nowak's books, but I know that he has long been one of the leading researchers in this area. As with the revival of group selection, his work has been both celebrated and reviled. (Out on the fringes again, there are theoretical biologists modeling math in which altruism can be selected for via genetic drift, precisely the sort of thing which the math Dawkins was basing his ideas on said was virtually impossible.)
posted by clawsoon at 7:47 AM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Death and Life of Great American Cities: A classic on the patterns that make city neighbourhoods work for their inhabitants or destroy them.
posted by clawsoon at 7:55 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 7:55 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
(Another problem with The Selfish Gene: Its examples focus on genes which make an individual faster or stronger or smarter, which can make you forget about all of the evolution which has been in favour of systems which broaden an individual's potential. A gene that builds strong muscles might be helpful, but a system which spends energy on building strong muscles only if it proves to be necessary will be even more successful. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution is the big one on this topic, though I'll admit I've never read it and some of the reviews say that it's a bit of a slog.)
posted by clawsoon at 8:12 AM on July 2, 2018
posted by clawsoon at 8:12 AM on July 2, 2018
"All life in all worlds" -this was the object of the author's seventeen-year quest for knowledge and discovery, culminating in this book. In a manner unmistakably his own, Murchie delves into the interconnectedness of all life on the planet and of such fields as biology, geology, sociology, mathematics, and physics. He offers us what the poet May Sarton has called "a good book to take to a desert island as sole companion, so rich is it in knowledge and insight."
The Seven Mysteries of Life
posted by stinkfoot at 9:58 AM on July 2, 2018
The Seven Mysteries of Life
posted by stinkfoot at 9:58 AM on July 2, 2018
Whoa, are you me? The timeline and bookshelves seem to match. Here are a few others on mine:
Sciences of the Artificial - Herbert Simon
At Home in the Universe - Stuart Kauffman
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter - Terrence Deacon
The Collapse of Complex Societies - Joseph Tainter
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems - CS Holling
posted by sapere aude at 4:59 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Sciences of the Artificial - Herbert Simon
At Home in the Universe - Stuart Kauffman
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter - Terrence Deacon
The Collapse of Complex Societies - Joseph Tainter
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems - CS Holling
posted by sapere aude at 4:59 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
« Older Is this normal for a physical therapist? | How do I preserve this documentary film without... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:20 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]