Another experiment

As a way to facilitate discussion on the complexity idea I'd like to see if a blog is a good way to share ideas. So here it is, using the good services of Google, once again.

I come to this through my long-time dissatisfaction with deterministic pop dy models and my conviction that variability is as much a part of natural systems as central tendency. By treating systems as averages with deterministic behaviors plus a random error term we are leaving out, perhaps the most important part of their makeup. I believe the error term is not random, and cannot all be explained by adding more variables or substantially reduced by improving measurement precision and accuracy. As long as we concentrate our science on central tendencies we will be missing what may be the central wellspring conferring resiliency – variability conditioned and shaped through generations of interaction with the natural environment. This is not random variability, it is informed variability, informed by the context of a population's history in a particular place and time. It need not have any formal statistical structure, and probably is not stationary, but constantly tracks environmental changes.

One difficulty is in arriving at a formal definition of this variability. For starters, I would like to look at George's neural nets and understand (1) how noise in the incoming signal was incorporated. From there we would try to see (2) how the network responded to that noise. These would be analogs to (1) environmental variability and (2) genetic or other response.

Another difficulty is that it is probably impossible to observe or characterize (2) in natural systems. Perhaps we can say “if (2) has certain properties then we expect (some system behavior or response).