Perceiving the universe as a hierarchical system, ranging from quarks to atoms to molecules to molecular-composed things, both biotic and abiotic, thence to clusters of things, which are arranged together into mega-clumps, which clumps are also aggregating, can lead to some interesting insights. We may call these "applications".

 

Sociology. The current physical arrangement of systems are arbitrary, random, and temporary. Examples of temporary social systems are families, corporations, and schools. The sports teams at my high school had orange uniforms. Nearby high schools had colors like yellow, purple, and green. At home games, I remember watching the invaders file off their school buses, each wearing light green jerseys with white trim, and emblazoned with dark green "F". We would gaze at the adversaries. The residents of my town seemed tall, straight, and sturdy, while the "others" seemed pale, fat, and smelly. So my wiring had "us" as good, and "them" as not good.

 

But the whole thing was arbitrary! That's what I realized when I began to study systems. Whatever system you are in is just the result of a random clumping! I could have just as easily ended up in a different family or a different town; I could have been in the green-and-white group! Whatever town you live in, whatever societal group you are in, Caucasian, Asian, Christian, Muslim, tall, short, male, female, is just the luck of the draw. Why demonize the others? Why be threatened by them? It is just random aggregation. "Us" and "them" depend upon arbitrary demarcations.

 

And there were additional groupings also, beyond the population center-based collections, such as the schools. Within our school were certain groups. In 3rd, 4th and 5th grades, we became acutely aware on the playground that each was in a different class. My classmates and I formed a "gang" together, and had a fairly strong social pact. If you messed with one of us, the rest would come quickly in support of the beleagered member. Later, in high school, when the classroom organization was dissolved in favor of subject studies, and we were left to swim in the sea of students, we formed new alliances based on different preferences and behavioral strata. There were the "jocks", the sports-oriented folks, there were the "heads", the dope-smoking miscreants who listened to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and there were the geeks, some academically inclined and some just plain old "weird". We each hung out with our own "kind". Upon graduation, those social knots in turn unraveled, and new groups formed, and dissolved, and so on.

 

In sum, the present (social) groupings are arbitrary, and they are temporary. Variety is is good, and varietal assemblages as well (we surely don't want a universe populated by nothing but undifferentiated grey goo), but these aggregated differentiations are neither permanent nor immutable. So 'Us' and 'Them' are merely temporary, contingent constructs. To attach undue emotional valence to these temporary systems, societal or otherwise, is to dissipate thermodynamic work cycles for naught. 

 

Psychology. I realized from hierarchical systems study that control is a top-down phenomena. The bigger assemblages control where the smaller ones go. If someone decides to go to the burger restaurant and eat a hamburger, with relish and pickles, then their digestive system has to process it. If they do shots of whiskey, and smoke cigarettes, it is up to them, not up to their constituent systems (digestive, respiratory, nervous, muscular, etc). However, these subsystems have to adapt to whatever the larger system (the person) decides to ingest/inhale.

 

While considering these hierarchical relations, I realized a simple and marvelous fact: my emotions were under my control, and not vice versa. Before this revelation, if I was in a bad mood, or sad, or anxious, I thought I couldn't do anything about it. I needed the external situation to change first; whatever thing had 'caused' my bad emotional state must be removed or altered first. But then I realized that I could simplty choose to be happy, or peaceful, the same way I might choose to eat a hamburger. Emotions are not supposed to run me; I am supposed run my emotions. Before that I had unknowingly let my "parts" dominate the "system". My feelings had dictated what I would do in response to external stimulus. Now I suddenly realized that my emotional response was (theoretically, anyway) under my aegis. As I explained to one of my friends soon after, "If you want everything on the outside to be good before you can feel good inside, you are in for a long wait." Don't wait for the external environment to be favorable before you get in a good mood. Simply choose to be happy. Peace begins within, and can simply be chosen, and not dependent upon when everyone and everything around you seems favorable.

 

Business. In the Enron collapse, the principals, Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow, were intelligent and capable businessmen. They were called "the brightest guys in the room" (a documentary movie was made about them with the same title), but they didn't realize that the "room" is always "brighter" than you. The system is always bigger and stronger and more intelligent than any of its constituent agents. If you think your parent system is just a toy that you can manipulate, you'll find out eventually that it has more moving parts than you can control.

 

Foriegn Policy. In in a similar vein to the Enron fiasco, with the current (2003 - present) U.S./Iraq war, the U.S. has had a lot more firepower than its foe the Al-Quaeda, but could not "win" because it tried to operate outside of the larger system. No part, however disproportionate and seemingly dominant its resources, is able to dominate its parent system. The system will always rebalance itself. This was demonstrated for several hundred years in Europe, with the "balance of powers" determining shifting alliances among France, Spain, and England, and later including Germany and Russia. No single state power can dominate, subvert, or avoid the international system; the other members of the system will attempt to counterbalance the strongest and most aggressive one. The U.S. was dominant, post-Soviet Union, but this apparent dominance inevitably led to ruinous adventures abroad. Same happened to Napoleon, and to Sweden's Charles XII, and to any other leader of a "great power" who got too ambitious. George H.W. Bush was smart; post-Vietnam he realized he needed a coalition to succeed in a forieign affair. Ten years later George W. Bush tried to railroad the international system (sending Colin Powell to the U.N. to claim Niger "yellowcake" sales to Iraq) and the result has been a long, unpopular, and violent occupation, with no resolution yet in sight.

 

Biology. As I have noted in my critique of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins (in my book review of Brian Goodwin's How the Leopard Changed its Spots), I found evolution as promulgated by the Darwinians to be a small and dissatisfying theory. So -- we evolved from apelike hominids and now compete for dwindling scraps of food to feed our progeny. Hmmm...not really inspiring. But once I began to discover the view of adapting systems, I became fascinated with the theory of evolution, and with biology in general. Evolutionary biology offers an encompassing story of change over time, a story of continuity maintaining itself through perturbation. The fossil record, for instance, becomes a great testimony to adaptation over the eons, as varied forms and arrangements come and go. And yet the force putting "things" into place, biotic things that run and go and do, is unabated, strengthened even, over the course of time. Today we can see "things" creating other "things", ever more varied. By this I mean humans creating semi-autonomous agents, from refrigerators to satellite navigation systems to automatic floor sweepers. This process of creation hearkens directly back to the "meta-process" of creation, underlying all.

  

But, but, but... here's the key, for me: human adaptation specifically, and living (species-level) adaptation generally, as expressed in Darwin's theory, explains very little on its own. It doesn't tell us what happened during the ten billion years prior to "life" coming to be, here on earth. Life, as we know it, is an outgrowth of a larger, earlier process. Life is a subset of a larger process, which I am here calling "adapting systems" (It is known elsewhere under the titles "Chaos", "Complexity", "Complex Adaptive Systems", "Autocatalytic Sets", "Self-Organization", "Dynamic Systems", and so forth. I believe that the fact that there are so many competing nomenclatures tells us how potentially fruitful this field can be). And, of equal importance, evolution doesn't explain all the nonbiotic phenomenon around us, from weather patterns to earthquakes to comets and sunspots. All these things are part of this "larger process" which the adaptive systems ideas are directly referencing.

 

I think it might be argued that all the problems of this particular species (homo sapiens) stems from the dilemma of misunderstanding the larger process. Think about it: we are plagued with violent crime, unending wars, obesity, drug and alcohol addiction, an environmental degradation of severe proportions. We have economic instability and are (many of us) plagued with doubt, anger, shame, and ennui. What to make of all the woes? Well, our myriads of woes are telling us to look to the source from which we all spring. And this source is not merely the "Big Bang", nor the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the Great Winding Down), nor the Electromagnetic Strong-Weak force, nor the Darwinian struggle for survival. No, we need to look at something that includes all of this, encompasses it all, along with art and history and poetry and all human endeavor. And all of this is, I argue, the process of systems, collections of "related stuff", both biotic and abiotic, adapting to changing environments.

   You either drive change or you're driven by it. Take your pick.

 

Some of my conclusions may already be self-evident to others, apart from systems analysts. But they are examples of the insights that can be seen in the adaptation patterns of dynamical systems. These insights can loosen some of the conceptual straightjackets we have acquired over the years, and help us to see our universe afresh.