First Law: Embrace Uncertainty!

The system of life embraced uncertainty by incorporating noises and risks into its structure, into its processes and into its outcomes in ways that made it sufficiently robust to recover from devastating blows and sufficiently adaptable to evolve with slow or rapid changes. The earlier post  Laws of Natural Selection  summarizes the laws, including this one, which sustain life as a whole.  

The system of life is a dynamic web of widely varying species in which each species is populated by completely expendable individuals-diverse in ages, characteristics, and locations, vulnerable to one another and to a host of other species, and internally programmed to die- but produced in such abundance that most species adapt and survive for millions of years in a wide range of environments. The system of life makes no effort to preserve individuals or species because that would be counter- productive to its own survival. Likewise, the survival of a particular species is not determined by the competence or endurance of select individuals, but upon species characteristics coupled with the collective diversity, abundance and adaptability (improved by limited life spans) of its individuals.

The ever changing, ever adaptable, interacting web of species endures even though most species spring into life, endure for a few million years and then go extinct-never to surface again. It is a massively redundant web that has repeatedly endured and recovered from random events that have destroyed as many as 99% of its individuals and 90% of its species.

Underlying and generating the web of life is an uncertain process of genetic inheritance and genetic pruning, a process that incorporates both random and programmed copying errors in DNA and RNA to produce phenotype variations which are then tested in the “free markets” of survival in which competitive improvements are more likely, though not certain, to reproduce and thrive at the expense of less successful variations.  

The process relies on massive diversity and redundancy to produce a robust, sustainable system from uncertain and relatively fragile components.  Unfortunately, to our way of seeing things, the fact that the system of life embraces uncertainty does not give us a personal sense of security; unlike other species we are consciously aware of life’s risks and limitations, and they frighten us. We prefer to avoid, to control, to insure or to eliminate risks rather than to embrace them. We construct physical systems and belief systems that increase our personal sense of security -a sense which may be based in reality or merely believed – seldom considering whether the tradeoffs we make to construct our systems are healthy and sustainable.

Our choices appear to be more intelligent than nature’s because they have enabled many of us to live better, longer, more certain lives than ever before in human history. But there are signs that our systems are fragile and that they are depleting the reserves of the web of life.  Do we have viable options to indefinitely extend our good fortune, or is our best course merely to proceed with our methods until they no longer work? I believe that we can sustain our modern societies, but to do so we must, among other things, consciously embrace a greater degree of uncertainty in our individual lives, in our belief systems, in our businesses, in our economic systems, and in our political systems.

In my March 19 post “Feel Vulnerable? You can beggar your neighbors or you progeny for temporary relief”,  I discussed how we can try to reduce personal risk by accumulating wealth; a strategy that is reasonable to a point, but beyond that point it increases the risks for everyone else which ultimately increases our own vulnerabilities. The Second Law of Thermodynamics cannot be abrogated, we cannot eliminate uncertainties and risks, we can only shift them to other individuals, to systems in which we operate, or to ecosystems in which we live. Corporations, governments or ecosystems collapse when too many individuals beggar these systems to selfishly feather their own nests; a lesson we have the opportunity to learn from the current financial crisis.