Chaos

More or less at random, I started reading Michael Blastand's great book "The Hidden Half". I am quite sure, if somehow I re-ran the last year starting at the same point, I would not have encountered this book. Why? Read on.

You may have heard of the "butterfly effect". What you may not have heard is that it covers almost everything, not just weather.

The way genes are expressed have feedback loops and these loops include the environment. Feedback loops are the source of the phenomenon of chaos, just as they are in predicting the weather. There is no reason why two individuals with the same genotype will not, due to chaotic gene expression, reveal radically different phenotypes. Chaos is generally ignored - for example, in Michael's great book "The Hidden Half". Loops like this are mentioned, for example, Walter Isaacson''s "The Code Breaker". In the case of Blastland's crayfish, any tiny variation would produce larger and larger variations. The variation here could be down to the presence or absence of a single molecule.

Chaos theory is perhaps the most important advance in science since Newton. It covers 90% of all phenomena - the other 10% being phenomena that have neat "cause-and-effect" patterns - precisely that small differences in initial conditions do not result in large long-term variations. Chaos was initially discovered in theoretical mathematical models where all "causes" were perfectly known. The problem, of course, reality does not allow you to re-wind the clock and watch the "instant replay". Underneath it all is a foam of truly random phenomena. Or we might say irrecusable chaos.

It would seem that differences in the marmokreb's bodies must have corresponding differences in gene expression - what genes are "turned on" at any point in time (epigenetics). Since the "turning on" of genes can be part of feedback loops of influence, it also seems that such "turning on" could be part of a Chaotic System. Even further, we may postulate that such a situation turned up in the crayfish and provided a way to produce variation without sex - a very powerful innovation. These animals are infesting the world from Alberta to Madagascar. Such an explanation is hypothetical to be sure but it leaped to my mind the instant I read about the phenomenon. Doing a bit of online "research", I find that it has not leaped to the mind of anyone else I can find, but it would not be hard to gather some confirming evidence, simply by checking individuals for variations in what genes are active. Looking for "loops" of influence would be harder, but it may be simplified by looking for feedback loops that are known to exist in other animals.

Characterizing such phenomena as "unseen forces", as on the cover of this book, is terribly misleading. It presents the metaphor of a hidden "force", akin to the finger of God. The "force" at work is a fundamental property of Nature itself. Reality itself places a limit on what we can and cannot predict and at what precision and over what time scale. Or we might say, we are faced with a limit to what we can know.

Still, even in the case of professional science writers like Blanstlans, Chaos theory seems like trigonometry to a spaniel. 

Here is a quick video for those who don't have the time to read Blastand's book.