Untamable curiosity, innovation, discovery, and bricolage: Are we doomed to progress to ever increasing complexity?

A trapper of eighteenth century needed a box of matches, a gun and a knife, and perhaps, a tent and a canoe or a dogsled to survive in the wilderness. Today, almost anyone of us would feel uncomfortable without, in addition, GPS, a mobile phone with internet access, a medicine-chest with at least aspirin, an antibiotic as well as a serum against snake bite, and a lot more to master the same situation as the backwoods contemporary of George Washington. Only a tiny time span, however, compared to human history has passed since the glorious days of trapper life, and nobody will seriously doubt that complexity of life has increased enormously since then. This essay is an attempt to combine messages from three sources: (i) a book on scientific innovation, society and the future written by Helga Nowotny [1], (ii) an article on a model for the evolution of technology by Brian Arthur and Wolfgang Polak [2], and (iii) François Jacob’s concept evolution and tinkering [3] that has been recently revisited, for example, by Denis Duboule and Adam Wilkins [4].

[1]  A. Wilkins.  Recasting developmental evolution in terms of genetic pathway and network evolution … and the implications for comparative biology , 2005, Brain Research Bulletin.

[2]  J. Monod.  Le hasard et la nécessité , 1970 .

[3]  Tang,et al.  Self-Organized Criticality: An Explanation of 1/f Noise , 2011 .

[4]  P. Bak,et al.  Self-organized criticality. , 1988, Physical review. A, General physics.

[5]  Tang,et al.  Critical exponents and scaling relations for self-organized critical phenomena. , 1988, Physical review letters.

[6]  James H. Brown,et al.  A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology , 1997, Science.

[7]  W. Gehring.  The genetic control of eye development and its implications for the evolution of the various eye-types. , 2002, The International journal of developmental biology.

[8]  J. Garcia-Fernández,et al.  Evo-Devo: the long and winding road. , 2003, The International journal of developmental biology.

[9]  F. Jacob,et al.  Evolution and tinkering. , 1977, Science.

[10]  Peter Schuster,et al.  How does complexity arise in evolution , 1996 .

[11]  Eörs Szathmáry,et al.  The Major Transitions in Evolution , 1997 .

[12]  J. Schumpeter.  Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung , 1913 .

[13]  Hubert S. Markl.  Fear of the future , 2005, Nature.

[14]  Wolfgang Polak,et al.  The evolution of technology within a simple computer model , 2006, Complex..

[15]  R. Solé,et al.  Selection, Tinkering, and Emergence in Complex Networks - Crossing the Land of Tinkering , 2002 .

[16]  Solé,et al.  Extinction and self-organized criticality in a model of large-scale evolution. , 1996, Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics.

[17]  A. Wilkins,et al.  The evolution of 'bricolage'. , 1998, Trends in genetics : TIG.

[18]  B. Lazar,et al.  Evolution of the atmosphere and oceans , 1986, Nature.

[19]  Robert T. Pennock,et al.  The evolutionary origin of complex features , 2003, Nature.

[20]  Obukhov,et al.  Self-organized criticality in a crack-propagation model of earthquakes. , 1991, Physical review. A, Atomic, molecular, and optical physics.

[21]  P. Schuster.  How does complexity arise in evolution: Nature's recipe for mastering scarcity, abundance, and unpredictability , 1996 .

[22]  J. Gogarten,et al.  The early evolution of cellular life. , 1995, Trends in ecology & evolution.