Self-organised systems

Some minds claim new theories on complex systems to sweep away any form of genetic determinism, until they claim that the adaptability of the living would hardly know any limit. Self-organised complex systems would be able to generate new properties and adapt very quickly to new constraints.

Thus, man could invent any fireworks and living organisms would be able to get out without major difficulties. It is of course to forget that any system, as complex as one can imagine, always knows certain limits. The question is therefore basically where these limits are, and whether the artifacts put in place by civilization exceed them or not.

To this is added the fact that these theories, although useful in bringing the scientific world back to a little more modesty in the face of the complexity of reality, have little to offer in terms of explaining the mysteries of the living. A recent paper by René Doursat of the Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris Ile-de-France, CREA, École Polytechnique et
CNRS (February 2010):

" Complex collective behaviour may result from individual rules based on simple agents, a fact often highlighted as the distinctive mark of complex systems. However, most of the well-known emerging motifs are only “complex” in relative terms: either random and unpredictable (dispersed patches and stripes, clouds of moving birds, fortuitous social groups, etc.) or printed by conditions with particular limits (feelings of ants stretched between nest and food, etc.). These phenomena are statistically consistent and/or repetitive, displaying “informational poverty” similar to textures, but never really presenting an intrinsic architecture.

It is clear that the emergence of complex systems, whether they take thousands of years to realize themselves, or simply because any system is limited, cannot guarantee the adaptability of organisms to any new constraint. These theories only enlarge the model of genetic + epigenetic reasoning little, without changing anything fundamental to the concept of limited adaptability.

An example of the demographic explosion: the almost exponential growth of humanity is already endangering the planet. On the one hand, one has to wonder why the anti-ecological lifestyles are what they are, if they arise either from the natural needs and tendencies of the human being, or from more or less larval psychic disorders, which then involve discerning and explaining.

The same model of reasoning must jointly apply to the problem of the proliferation of the human species: do the factors in question belong to the nature of things, for example the fact that man does not have a natural predator capable of limiting populations, or that medicine limits infant mortality; or are these factors related to behavioural disorders, such as certain characteristics of sexual life induced by culture, or by reigning ideologies, etc.

Another solution would be to hope that any emergence of the self-organised system represented by humanity would curb its proliferation. In doubt, it is better to take the bull by the horns without wasting more time…