deodands

As featured in the Guardian...

Sort of. Linked to in the online edition but despite excitedly digging through the recycling box to find last weeks paper (see, Lomborg, there is a point to recycling) not in the paper copy.

It's not quite clear from the article, but it sounds to me like an Eric Bonabeau talk at ETCon claimed that the concept of emergence goes back to Turing's morphogenesis work. (Hence a link to my site). Lovely to have my site referenced, but whoever said it, it's a weak claim. If 'emergent' means anything, it means properties that you can only see in a large enough interacting system, whereas Turing's reaction diffusion theory is good old fashioned applied mathematics. It only predicts emergent pattern in the sense that radio waves are an emergent property of Maxwell's equations. You might claim that his theory of Fibonacci phyllotaxis comes a bit closer: it has at least an idea of complexity increasing through time via a simple iterated dynamics, but the complexity is that the parastichy numbers are 89 and 55, say, not 3 and 5. These are differences of degree, not of kind: there's not anything to 'emerge'. Andrew Hodges does say somewhere that Turing was in a position where he could have gone towards chaos theory, but that remains a might have been.

I think the silliness most likely resides in the mushiness inherent whenever people start using words like 'emergent'. As the great and very cute John Maynard Smith says of complexity theory: 'Absolute fucking crap. Crap with good PR but crap' (via Andrew Brown's Darwin Wars).