I took a day off today and didn’t do much, so here are some thoughts about seagull distributions, as promised.
I’ve been reading (among other things) an ecology textbook I bought at a used bookstore, and I want to share something I read a couple weeks ago, from a chapter on animal distributions. A scientist predicted that among non-territorial animals, differences in habitat fitness (how suitable a habitat is for living) would be perfectly equalized by population density (that is, more individuals will go to the better habitats until they become so crowded that they are no better than the previously less-desirable habitats; as a result, the more plentiful habitats will have more residents and the more barren habitats will have fewer, such that survival and reproduction rates will be evenly balanced in all locations). Sure enough, they found that even though bushy areas were better for seagull to live than the grasslands (because they provide more food and shelter), the population density had been distributed in such a way that the bushy-area seagull and the grassland seagulls each had practically identical numbers of surviving offspring.
Upon reading this, I was awestruck. Initially, I appraised this as a work of genius, but the more I think about it, the beauty here is precisely that this system is dumb as rocks.The entire seagull population acts as a distributed fitness calculator, enacting something similar to a pressure distribution equation, but the seagulls don’t know that they are doing this. Thousands of individuals, each making their own choices based on very limited information have, in aggregate, found the most efficient solution to a huge optimization problem with no guidance, intention, oversight, or outside intervention.
In complexity science, patterns like these are known as emergent properties: higher level orders created by large numbers of simple interactions. Emergent order is a powerful explanatory tool; it provides a philosophical though-line from buyers in a commodity market to neurons in the brain. I’d read about it before, but this particular example with the seagulls hit differently. There’s an exquisite simplicity to it that stuck with me.
At its lowest level, our existence is a seagull distribution. We are nothing more (and nothing less) than a collection of multitudes, blindly reproducing at multiple scales simutaneously. Chemicals bond to conserve energy. Organisms evolve to maximize fitness*. Neurons reroute to minimize uncertainty. Languages develop to increase cooperation. Competitive firms organize to reduce commodity prices. Things that are good at continuing to exist continue existing, and things that aren’t don’t.
Excerpt From the Heart Sutra:
Body is nothing more than emptiness, emptiness is nothing more than body. The body is exactly empty, and emptiness is exactly body. The other four aspects of human existence — feeling, thought, will, and consciousness — are likewise nothing more than emptiness, and emptiness nothing more than they.
All things are empty: Nothing is born, nothing dies, nothing is pure, nothing is stained, nothing increases and nothing decreases. So, in emptiness, there is no body, no feeling, no thought, no will, no consciousness. There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. There is no seeing, no hearing, no smelling, no tasting, no touching, no imagining. There is nothing seen, nor heard, nor smelled, nor tasted, nor touched, nor imagined.
There is no ignorance, and no end to ignorance. There is no old age and death, and no end to old age and death. There is no suffering, no cause of suffering, no end to suffering, no path to follow. There is no attainment of wisdom, and no wisdom to attain.
*(Forgive my teleological language. It was necessary to keep the clauses parallel and brief)
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