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> Don Mikulecky....MED. Coll. Va. Levins and Lewontin some time ago
>in their "Dialectic Biologist" chalanged the idea that complexity is
>not the typical biological hieracrchy with humans on top. The animal
>rights spokespersons also have a lot to say about this. L. & L. give
>some nice examples to show how arbitrary putting humans as "most
>complex" is. E. O. Wilson recently was interviewed on NPR and
>candidly said that the world could easily do without humans but
>would be in BIG trouble without ants. Complexity should include
>the holistic picture of the ecosystem and relative roles. The
>idea that humans are so special indeed seems naive biologically,
>allthough
>has its basis in cybernetic reasoning moreso, I suspect.
>Rosen spends some time developing with some rigor the subjective
>aspects if the term "complexity" It can't be made quantitative or
>reduced to syntax.
One of the great problems with the current discussions of "complexity"
is that the definitions are completely formal ones, which themselves
only apply in a straightforward way to formal, mathematically-defined
entities.
Biologists know that the "complexity" of an organism depends very
heavily on which complexity criteria (i.e. observables)
one chooses (e.g. number of cells, number of neurons, number of
synapses, size of genome, size of perceptual repertoire,
etc etc etc). See J. T. Bonner's book
"Evolution of Complexity". Until a fixed observational frame
(fixed criteria for operationally determining the 'complexity' of
a material system) is agreed upon, no comparisons can be made.
This is why the formal definitions of complexity are so useless in
assessing the complexity of material systems such as biological
organisms -- nobody using the formal definitions ever specifies
what the criteria should be for a material system.
"Complexity" can be made rigorous if the conditions for its
measurement can be specified so that you and I when confronted by
the same animal or material system can both agree on its measure
(operational definition). It is not purely syntactic because it
depends upon how we observe the material system (the semantics
implemented by our measuring devices).
Such a measure is not "absolute" or "universal" in any Platonic sense,
but it has the merit of being applicable to the world outside of
our mathematical notations, a property which the measures currently in
vogue do not share.
Peter Cariani
eplunix!peter@eddie.mit.edu
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