A recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.
“A pervasive wonder of the natural world is the evolution of varied systems, including stars, minerals, atmospheres, and life,” the scientists write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not.
To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”
In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself.
And here, any writer should find their breath caught in their throat. Any writer would have to pause and marvel.
It’s a rare thing to hear the voice of science singing toward its twin in the humanities. The scientists seem to be searching in their paper for the right words to describe the way the nested trills of a flautist rise through a vaulted cathedral to coalesce into notes themselves not played by human breath. And how, in the very same way, the oil-slick sheen of a June Bug wing may reveal its unseen spectra only against the brief-blooming dogwood in just the right season of sun.
Both intricate configurations of art and matter arise and fade according to their shared characteristic, long-known by students of the humanities: each have been graced with enough time to attend to the necessary affairs of their most enduring pleasures.
Some of these more diverse and intricate configurations, the scientists write, are shed and forgotten over time. The configurations that persist are ones that find some utility or novel function in a process akin to natural selection, but a selection process driven by the passing-on of information rather than just the sowing of biological genes. Here the scientists are writing William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” perhaps without realizing it, and I can’t help but squint into the article for any sign of a nod toward the humanities.
Have they finally glimpsed, I wonder, the connectedness and symbiotic co-evolution of their own scientific ideas with those of the world’s writers? Have they learned to describe in their own quantifying language that cradle from which both our disciplines have emerged and the firmament on which they both stand — the hearing and telling of stories in order to exist? Have they quantified the quality of all existent matter, living and not: that all things inherit a story in data to tell, and that our stories are told by the very forms we take to tell them?
“Is there a universal basis for selection? Is there a more quantitative formalism underlying this conjectured conceptual equivalence—a formalism rooted in the transfer of information?,” they ask of the world’s disparate phenomena. “The answer to both questions is yes.”
Yes. They’ve glimpsed it, whether they know it or not. Sing to me, O Muse, of functional information and its complex diversity.
Form follows function follows form
The principle of complexity evolving at its own pace when left to its own devices, independent of time but certainly in a dance with it, is nothing new. Not in science, nor in its closest humanities kin, science and nature writing. Give things time and nourishing environs, protect them from your own intrusions and — living organisms or not — they will produce abundant enlacement of forms.
This is how poetry was born from the same larynxes and phalanges that tendered nuclear equations: We featherless bipeds gave language our time and delighted attendance until its forms were so multivariate that they overflowed with inevitable utility. And this is why the two were conjoined from birth, poetry and physics: A world lacking either is a world in which humans could not survive.
In her Pulitzer-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” nature writer Annie Dillard explains plainly that evolution is the vehicle of such intricacy in the natural world, as much as it is in our own thoughts and actions.
“The stability of simple forms is the sturdy base from which more complex, stable forms might arise, forming in turn more complex forms,” she explains, drawing on the undercap frills of mushrooms and filament-fine filtering tubes inside human kidneys to illustrate her point.
“Utility to the creature is evolution’s only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form,” writes Dillard. “Of the multiplicity of forms, I know nothing. Except that, apparently, anything goes. This holds for forms of behavior as well as design — the mantis munching her mate, the frog wintering in mud.”
Dillard’s conclusion should have been cited in the paper, given how close it lands to the scientists’ mark. She notes that, of all forms of life we’ve ever known to exist, only about 10% are still alive. What extravagant multiplicity.
“Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in the intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failures of all life,” Dillard writes. “The wonder is — given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning texture of time — the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous.”
Our many swirling eddies
“This paper, and the reason why I'm so proud of it, is because it really represents a connection between science and the philosophy of science that perhaps offers a new lens into why we see everything that we see in the universe,” lead scientist Michael Wong told Motherboard in a recent interview.
Wong is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science. In his team’s paper, that bridge toward scientific philosophy is not only preceded by a long history of literary creativity but directly theorizes about the creative act itself.
“The creation of art and music may seem to have very little to do with the maintenance of society, but their origins may stem from the need to transmit information and create bonds among communities, and to this day, they enrich life in innumerable ways,” Wong’s team writes.
“Perhaps, like eddies swirling off of a primary flow field, selection pressures for ancillary functions can become so distant from the core functions of their host systems that they can effectively be treated as independently evolving systems,” the authors add, pointing toward the elaborate mating dance culture observed in birds of paradise. “Perhaps it will be humanity’s ability to learn, invent, and adopt new collective modes of being that will lead to its long-term persistence as a planetary phenomenon. In light of these considerations, we suspect that the general principles of selection and function discussed here may also apply to the evolution of symbolic and social systems.”
The Mekhilta teaches that all Ten Commandments were pronounced in a single utterance. Similarly, the Maharsha says the Torah’s 613 mitzvoth are only perceived as a plurality because we’re time-bound humans, even though they together form a singular truth which is indivisible from He who expressed it.
Or, as the Mishna would have it, “the creations were all made in generic form, and they gradually expanded.”
Like swirling eddies off of a primary flow field.
“O Lord, how manifold are thy works!,” cried out David in his psalm. “In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.”
In all things, then — from poetic inventions, to rare biodiverse ecosystems, to the charted history of our interstellar equations — it is best if we conserve our world’s intellectual and physical diversity, for both the study and testimony of its immeasurable multiplicity.
Because, whether wittingly or not, science is singing the tune of the humanities. And whether expressed in algebraic logic or ancient Greek hymn, its chorus is the same throughout the universe: Be fruitful and multiply.
