by Clare Lacy (from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow)

Human civilization supposedly thrives on order and predictability; it means that people will obey traffic laws and pay their taxes, show up to work on time, and keep their word. Predictability gives us a sense of order, and order lends itself in varying degrees to unity, to nationalism, to legality, and to community. Whether we like it or not, much of our lives are governed by these ideas of order and predictability, and by our assumptions that these ideals are universal and natural. And indeed, nature does follow its own order with periodic population swells, predictable animal behavior, and food chains, but in attempting to mimic or find equilibrium with natural conditions, humans never seem to be able to get it quite right.

With all variables seemingly accounted for, chaos often predominates over predictive systems, and we are left wondering what clue we are missing in our search for order in natural systems. In every field of inquiry, scientists have come up against certain problems that until the advent of chaos theory were written off as unsolvable.

These bugs in the system were most often attributed to inaccurate equipment and unforeseen or unknown variables, and were generally written off as anomalies. Such anomalies could be found in everything from weather simulators to the rhythms of dripping faucets, in everything that we took for granted to be steady, linear, and predictable. But systems don’t tend toward predictability and sameness, according to chaos theorists: While they do seem to follow certain patterns, a “sensitivity toward initial conditions” (many of which seem to be outside the power of humans to detect, or control) means that the exact same thing will almost never happen twice.

These conditions could be as simple as an extra number after a decimal in a mathematical calculation, or vague enough to be still unidentifiable by humans. It is these sensitive initial conditions, chaos theorists believe, that nature depends on for genetic diversity and adaptive behaviors that lead to evolution; in looking for predictability, the connection that scientists were missing was the presence in every field of a point in linear systems where things become disorderly. Chaos theorists began exploring and graphing the similarities between these forms of disorder, as well as the boundaries of their behaviors. Graphed one way, a line representing seemingly random disorder in a given system seems to spiral into chaos; graphed another way, it outlines a distinct and repeating form, but never along the exact same path.

It is this unique dissimilarity that makes for the instantly recognizable forms of fractals, of snowflakes, and of the leaves of ferns, and for the uniqueness of each of these from others. Not only was it a new and uncharted area of science, but it was universally applicable, and cast new light on old problems.

The initial resistance from the scientific community toward this idea of an underlying order in problems previously dismissed as unsolvable was strong. Not only did it call to mind past failures at further exploration, but it sorely impeded the ability of scientists to play god. The idea that there is a certain amount of chaos or sensitive dependence on initial conditions theoretically meant that if we could just figure out what those conditions were, we could duplicate any system. On the other hand, if we couldn’t identify those conditions, we would have to acknowledge the presence of a code that we could not crack; it was not complete chaos, but neither was it order in which we could interfere.

If chaos theory has a general lesson to impart to us, it’s that uniformity and conformity are literally unnatural. In monoculture crop plantations, large tracts of land are planted with the cloned seed of a single “perfect” organism. In the event of disease, there is no genetic variance among these identical plants that may include a predisposition to resistance, but the reaction has been to deal with this outcome through large amounts of pesticides. Forest fires spread easily through trees of one species planted over clear-cut areas; generally, one pine tree is planted for every tree in a diverse forest that is cut down (or so the propaganda goes). Grown close together with no variety of height and spacing, natural fires are suppressed until the buildup of underbrush leads to widespread fires that rage out of control.

To the extent that societies must find equilibrium with the natural world and its principles, it’s worth noting that we tend to see differences rather than similarities, and to miss overarching, sometimes monstrously obvious themes. Aberrations from the “normal” brand us as malcontents, troublemakers, or threats of various ilks. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and a whole slew of other mentalities spring from a denial of the natural diversity of the universe. It is a problem that affects our society beyond the scientific community, and will continue to do so as long as we attempt to impose an order that disregards the world’s natural and observable affection for unique dissimilarity.

For nature, chaos theory tells us, deviation is the norm.

People suck, and that’s my contention.
We’re a virus with shoes.
—Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture?

Well. That partially depends on whether or not you believe language shapes thought or vice-versa. Lots of smart people disagree on this particular point. On one side are those like, oh, Noam Chomsky, who say cognition and certain brain structures give rise to infinitely varying, yet universal, linguistic impulses.

On the other side there are linguistic relativists, like the curious Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist (Darwin was an amateur biologist) and evolutionary biologist, botanist, theologian, and physicist, who in addition to linguistics, wrote about gravitation, “being,” trees, color theory, evolution, large stemmed plants, electromagnetism, dreams, and even wrote a Hopi-English dictionary.

Whorf grew to prominence and influence through his work, exploring how languages shape the habit and thought of their users.

Presume, as many linguists do, that there’s a middle ground between these two positions, and admit the possibility that language acts on people much as people act on or through language.

“A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts. The notion of the meme—coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of memetics—crystallizes this view of the communication process.

Georges Bataille similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective of contagion.

In Bataille any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel for ideas which pass through him/her.”If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, then the author is only a link among many readings.” The author is simply a node on a network, through which ideas pass…

Subjectivity is an illusion, one that allows us to operate comfortably in this plane of existence, but which nonetheless masks true reality, in which there is no division between subject and object: “There is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence”

—Bernardo Attias, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University

The complicated relationship between language and its host was a major theme in the work of William S. Burroughs. When pondering the all-encompassing constancy of flux, and the role of human beings and viruses as co-evolutionary partners, and when wondering at the viral properties of language and culture, it’s worth considering the thoughts of a visionary like Burroughs, who identified as a Manichean, and who believed he was writing mythology for the space age:

“I am advancing the theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever,” wrote Burroughs, suggesting that what human evolution requires is actually a biological mutation away from that which one knows as human.

Burroughs always did have a way of making profane things like “Get over yourself, changeling,” and “extinction is inevitable” sound somehow like an already familiar pulp novel.

by Brian Awehali

“You’re not just kissing,” said one scientist suggestively, “you are likely absorbing information about your partner’s immune system, looking for a good match should you two procreate.”

Other scientists in attendance copiously supported their colleague’s assertion by noting findings in related studies. “A similar tendency has also been found,” asserted one postdoctoral researcher in the Berkeley Olfactory Research Program, “in some rather interesting tests where women sniffing male armpit sweat chose those indicating immune systems complementary–not similar–to their own.”

Certainly there exist women for whom the idea of a long session of male armpit huffing evokes an unseemly dark thrill. You might hope that one or more such women were among those who signed up for this study. But when pondering this (absolutely true) armpit-sniffing story, one must consider the long tour of ignominies visited upon countless women that led up to this particular moment in scientific history, and the moment in which each woman in the study was bade: Choose the best armpit.

(Alternately, the study may not have involved live male armpits at all, but rather the sniffing of previously collected male armpit sweat. Either way, it’s an odd study. It also provides me a rare opportunity to link to an only slightly related Old Spice commercial about armpits, men, manliness, and frenching):

Anyway.

Even if you don’t want to have kids or sniff anyone’s armpits, scientists say, the kiss is still crucial: it can help you chemically decide whether you will have fun dating. At least that’s the assumption you could make from research results indicating that people clicked with others based on levels of hormones present in saliva. Testosterone and oxytocin–a hormone involved in maternal bonding with offspring–are among the many hormones expressed in saliva.

(In a thankfully totally separate yet related experiment, virgin sheep injected with oxytocin began to mother unrelated lambs, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise, and which they were surely confused about afterward. Other oxytocin studies reveal even more interesting things).

Those with average-to-poor dental hygiene can take some heart from these recent studies: Even with all the advertising focus on minty fresh sterile mouths, oral hygiene or the lack thereof doesn’t obscure these chemical clues, researchers say. Sloppy kissers who aren’t lesbians can take heart as well: Men apparently like more drool in a kiss, perhaps because they tend to have worse senses of smell and taste and hence need more to work with.

–with reporting by Kari Lydersen

Lorenz was a mathemetician and a meteorologist who, in the early 1960s, discovered that weather simulation models he was developing were exhibiting chaotic, non-predictive behavior, despite a fixed set of variables and no apparent equipment malfunction. Two identical weather simulation machines, side-by-side, given the same variables to process. Wildly different results. How?

Lorenz eventually concluded that it was a “dependence on initial conditions” — in this case, the fact of computers rounding variables to decimal points: 3.12879 expressed as 3.13, etc. Even extending the number of decimal points in the simulators did not produce matching results from the weather machines. Minute variations gave rise to wildly different chains of events.

Lorenz also advanced work on what came to be known as the Lorenz Attractor, or Strange Attractor, which describes the behavior of chaotic flow in lasers, dynamos, and water wheels. The mathematical expression of Lorenz’s Strange Attractor is (seemingly coincidentally) shaped like a butterfly, and some Java programmer in Japan was kind enough to create an animated demonstration of it.

Contrary to some popular misconceptions about chaos theory, it doesn’t mean randomness prevails. Rather, it means that things occur in a non-linear, but deterministic fashion, with an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Fractal geometry in nature, as well as Mandelbrot sets, illustrate the mathematics of chaos theory.

French mathematician Henry Poincaré is really the “father” of chaos theory; Lorenz mostly re-popularized an idea that had merely fallen from the limelight. At the end of the 19th century, Poincaré, encouraged by an award offered by King Oscar II of Sweden, looked into how to explain the erratic orbit of Neptune and the broader question, is the solar system stable? (Poincaré’s eventual conclusion was no, but the preceding link provides a far more satisfying overview of his voyage to that conclusion.)

I was first exposed to chaos theory through James Gleick’s excellent book, Chaos: The Making of a New Science. The notion of a greater complexity and deeper order underlying the observable surface of things is great on many levels beyond the scholarly realm. Chaos theory is a rich metaphor for our present moment, which promises to impress upon quite a few people, in ways both small and large, pleasant and unpleasant, that everything is connected and even, to some extent, interdependent. And, apropos of our time in my opinion, this understanding now raises far more questions than it provides answers.