Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 5: Coevolution Cheaper than printing it out: buy the paperback book. Out of Control Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN - Neo-biological civilization - The triumph of the bio-logic - Learning to surrender our creations Chapter 2: HIVE MIND - Bees do it: distributed governance - The collective intelligence of a mob - Asymmetrical invisible hands - Decentralized remembering as an act of perception - More is more than more, it's different - Advantages and disadvantages of swarms - The network is the icon of the 21st century Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE - Entertaining machines with bodies - Fast, cheap and out of control - Getting smart from dumb things - The virtues of nested hierarchies - Using the real world to communicate - No intelligence without bodies - Mind/body black patch psychosis Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY - Biology: the future of machines - Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds - Random paths to a stable ecosystem - How to do everything at once - The Humpty Dumpty challenge Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION - What color is a chameleon on a mirror? - The unreasonable point of life - Poised in the persistent state of almost falling - Rocks are slow life - Cooperation without friendship or foresight Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX - Equilibrium is death - What came first, stability or diversity? - Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop - The origins of variation - Life immortal, ineradicable - Negentropy - The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL - In ancient Greece the first artificial self - Maturing of mechanical selfhood - The toilet: archetype of tautology - Self-causing agencies Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS - Bottled life, sealed with clasp - Mail-order Gaia - Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man - The very big ecotechnic terrarium - An experiment in sustained chaos - Another synthetic ecosystem, like California Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE - Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark - Migrating to urban weed - The deployment of intentional seasons - A cyclotron for the life sciences - The ultimate technology Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY - Pervasive round-the-clock plug in - Invisible intelligence - Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms - Programming a commonwealth - Closed-loop manufacturing - Technologies of adaptation Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS - Having your everything amputated - Instead of crunching, connecting - Factories of information - Your job: managing error - Connecting everything to everything Chapter 12: E-MONEY - Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins - The fax effect and the law of increasing returns - Superdistribution - Anything holding an electric charge will hold a fiscal charge - Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks - Fear of underwire economies Chapter 13: GOD GAMES - Electronic godhood - Theories with an interface - A god descends into his polygonal creation - The transmission of simulacra - Memorex warfare - Seamless distributed armies - A 10,000 piece hyperreality - The consensual ascii superorganism - Letting go to win Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM - An outing to the universal library - The space of all possible pictures - Travels in biomorph land - Harnessing the mutator - Sex in the library - Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps - Tunnelling through randomness Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION - Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine - What you can't engineer, evolution can - Mindless acts performed in parallel - Computational arms race - Taming wild evolution - Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules - Death is the best teacher - The algorithmic genius of ants - The end of engineering's hegemony Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL - Cartoon physics in toy worlds - Birthing a synthespian - Robots without hard bodies - The agents of ethnological architecture - Imposing destiny upon free will - Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald - Searching for co-control Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE - To enlarge the space of being - Primitives of visual possibilities - How to program happy accidents - All survive by hacking the rules - The handy-dandy tool of evolution - Hang-gliding into the game of life - Life verbs - Homesteading hyperlife territory Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE - The revolution of daily evolution - Bypassing the central dogma - The difference, if any, between learning and evolution - The evolution of evolution - The explanation of everything Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM - The incompleteness of Darwinian theory - Natural selection is not enough - Intersecting lines on the tree of life - The premise of non-random mutations - Even monsters follow rules - When the abstract is embodied - The essential clustering of life - DNA can't code for everything - An uncertain density of biological search space - Mathematics of natural selection Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS - Order for free - Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math - Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets - A question worth asking - Self-tuning vivisystems Chapter 21: RISING FLOW - A 4 billion year ponzi scheme - What evolution wants - Seven trends of hyper-evolution - Coyote trickster self-evolver Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY - Brains that catch baseballs - The flip side of chaos - Positive myopia - Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability - Operation Internal Look, Ahead - Varieties of prediction - Change in the service of non-change - Telling the future is what the systems are for - The many problems with global models - We are all steering Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES - What ever happened to cybernetics? - The holes in the web of scientific knowledge - To be astonished by the trivial - Hypertext: the end of authority - A new thinking space Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD - How to make something from nothing - Hijacking the universe TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS What color is a chameleon placed on the mirror? Stewart Brand posed that riddle to Gregory Bateson in the early 1970s. Bateson, together with Norbert Wiener, was a founding father of the modern cybernetic movement. Bateson had a most orthodox Oxford education and a most unorthodox career. He filmed Balinese dance in Indonesia; he studied dolphins; he developed a useful theory of schizophrenia. While in his sixties, he taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where his eccentric brilliant views on mental health and evolutionary systems caught the attention of holistically minded hippies. Stewart Brand, a student of Bateson's, was himself a legendary promoter of cybernetic holism. Brand published his chameleon koan in his Whole Earth Catalog, in 1974. Writes Brand of his riddle: "I asked the question of Gregory Bateson at a point in our interview when we were lost in contemplation of the function, if any, of consciousness-self-consciousness. Both of us being biologists, we swerved to follow the elusive chameleon. Gregory asserted that the creature would settle at a middle value in its color range. I insisted that the poor beast trying to disappear in a universe of itself would endlessly cycle through a number of its disguises." The mirror is a clever metaphor for informational circuits. Two ordinary mirrors facing each other will create a fun-house hall that ricochets an image back and forth until it vanishes into an infinite regress. Any message loosed between the two opposing mirrors bounces to exhaustion without changing its form. But what if one side is a responsive mirror, just as the chameleon is, in part reflecting, in part generating? The very act of accommodating itself to its own reflection would disturb it anew. Could it ever settle into a pattern persistent enough to call it something? Bateson felt the system-perhaps like self-consciousness-would quickly settle out at an equilibrium determined by the pull of the creature's many extremes in color. The conflicting colors (and conflicting viewpoints in a society of mind) would compromise upon a "middle value," as if it were a democracy voting. On the other hand, Brand opined that equilibrium of any sort was next to impossible, and that the adaptive system would oscillate without direction or end. He imagined the colors fluctuating chaotically in a random, psychedelic paisley. The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. What color is the consumer when you put him on the marketplace? Does he dip to the state of the lowest common denominator-a middle average consumer? Or does he oscillate in mad swings of forever trying to catch up with his own moving reflection? Bateson was tickled by the depth of the chameleon riddle and passed it on to his other students. One of them, Gerald Hall, proposed a third hypothesis for the final color of the mirror visitor: "The chameleon will stay whatever color he was at the moment he entered the mirror domain." This is the most logical answer in my view. The coupling between mirror and chameleon is probably so tight and immediate that almost no adaptation is possible. In fact, it may be that once the chameleon bellies up to the mirror, it can't budge from its color unless a change is induced from outside or from an erroneous drift in the chameleon's coloration process. Otherwise, the mirror/chameleon system freezes solidly onto whatever initial value it begins with. For the mirrored world of marketing, this third answer means the consumer freezes. He either locks onto whatever brand he began with, or he stops purchasing altogether. There are other possible answers, too. While conducting interviews for this book, I sometimes posed the chameleon riddle to my interviewees. The scientists understood it for the archetypal case of adaptive feedback it was. Their answers ranged over the map. Some examples: MATHEMATICIAN JOHN HOLLAND: It goes kaleidoscopic! There's a lag time, so it'll flicker all over the place. The chameleon won't ever be a uniform color. COMPUTER SCIENTIST MARVIN MINSKY: It might have a number of eigenvalues or colors, so it will zero in on a number of colors. If you put it in when it's green it might stay green, and if it was red it might stay red, but if you put it in when it was brown it might tend to go to green. NATURALIST PETER WARSHALL: A chameleon changes color out of a fright response so it all depends on its emotional state. It might be frightened by its image at first, but then later "warm up" to it, and so change colors. Putting a chameleon on a mirror seemed a simple enough experiment that I thought that even a writer could perform it. So I did. I built a small, mirrored box, and I bought a color-changing lizard and placed it inside. Although Brand's riddle had been around for 20 years, this was the first time, as far as I know, anyone had actually tried it. On the mirror the lizard stabilized at one color of green-the green of young leaves on trees in the spring-and returned to that one color each time I tried the experiment. But it would spend periods being brown before returning to green. Its resting color in the box was not the same dark brown it seemed to like when out of the mirrored box. Although I performed this experiment, I place very little confidence in my own results for the following important reasons: the lizard I used was not a true chameleon, but an anole, a species with a far more limited range of color adaptation than a true chameleon. (A true chameleon may cost several hundred dollars and requires a terrarium of a quality I did not want to possess.) More importantly, according to the little literature I read, anoles change colors for other reasons in addition to trying to match their background. As Warshall said, they also alter in response to fright. And frightened it was. The anole did not want to go into the mirrored box. The color green it presented in the box is the same color it uses when it is frightened. It may be that the chameleon in the mirror is merely in a constant state of fright at its own amplified strangeness now filling its universe. I certainly would go nutty in a mirrored box. Finally, there is this observer problem: I can only see the lizard when my face is peeking into the mirrored box, an act which inserts a blue eye and red nose into the anole's universe, a disturbance I could not circumvent. It may be that an exact answer to the riddle requires future experiments with an authentic chameleon and many more controls than I had. But I doubt it. True chameleons are full-bodied animals just as anoles are, with more than one reason for changing colors. The chameleon on a mirror riddle is best kept in idealized form as a thought experiment. Even in the abstract, the "real" answer depends on such specific factors as the reaction time of the chameleon's color cells, their sensitivity to a change in hue, and whether other factors influence the signals-all the usual critical values in feedback circuits. If one could alter these functions in a real chameleon, one could then generate each of the chameleon-on-the-mirror scenarios mentioned above. This, in fact, is what engineers do when they devise electronic control circuits to guide spaceships or steer robot arms. By tweaking delay times, sensitivity to signals, dampening values, etc., they can tailor a system to seek either a wide-ranging equilibrium (say, keeping the temperature between 68 and 70 degrees), or constant change, or some homeostatic point in between. We see this happening in networked markets. A sweater manufacturer will try to rig a cultural mirror that encourages wild fluctuations in the hopes of selling many styles of sweaters, while a dishwasher manufacture will try to focus the reflections onto the common denominators of only a few dishwasher images, since making varieties of sweaters is much cheaper than making varieties of dishwashers. The type of market is determined by quantity and speed of feedback signals. The important point about the chameleon on the mirror riddle is that the lizard and glass become one system. "Lizardness" and "mirrorness" are encompassed into a larger essence-a "lizard-glass"-which acts differently than either a chameleon or a mirror. Medieval life was remarkably unnarcissistic. Common folk had only vague notions of their own image in the broad sense. Their individual and social identities were informed by participating in rituals and traditions rather than by reflection. On the other hand, the modern world is being paved with mirrors. We have ubiquitous TV cameras, and ceaseless daily polling ("63 Percent of Us Are Divorced") to mirror back to us every nuance of our collective action. A steady paper trail of bills, grades, pay stubs, and catalogs helps us create our individual identity. Pervasive digitalization of the approaching future promises clearer, faster, and more omnipresent mirrors. Every consumer becomes both a reflection and reflector, a cause and an effect. The Greek philosophers were obsessed with the chain of causality, how the cause of an effect should be traced back in a relay of hops until one reached the Prime Cause. That backward path is the foundation of Western, linear logic. The lizard-glass demonstrates an entirely different logic-the circular causality of the Net. In the realm of recursive reflections, an event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes reflecting, bending, mirroring each other in a fun-house nonsense. Rather than cause and control being dispensed in a straight line from its origin, it spreads horizontally, like creeping tide, influencing in roundabout, diffuse ways. Small blips can make big splashes, and big blips no splashes. It is as if the filters of distance and time were subverted by the complex connecting of everything to everything. Computer scientist Danny Hillis has noted that computation, particularly networked computation, exhibits a nonlinear causality field. He wrote: In the physical universe the effect that one event has on another tends to decrease with the distance in time or in space between them. This allows us to study the motions of the Jovian moons without taking into account the motion of Mercury. It is fundamental to the twin concepts of object and action. Locality of action shows itself in the finite speed of light, in the inverse square law of fields, and in macroscopic statistical effects, such as rates of reaction and the speed of sound. In computation, or at least in our old models of computation, an arbitrarily small event can and often does cause an arbitrarily large effect. A tiny program can clear all of memory. A single instruction can stop the machine. In computation there is no analog of distance. One memory location is as easily influenced as another. The lines of control in natural ecologies also dissolve into a causality horizon. Control is not only distributed in space, but it is also blurred in time as well. When the chameleon steps onto the mirror, the cause of his color dissolves into a field of effects spinning back on themselves. The reasons for things do not proceed like an arrow, but rather spread to the side like a wind. continue... Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 5: Coevolution Cheaper than printing it out: buy the paperback book. Out of Control Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN - Neo-biological civilization - The triumph of the bio-logic - Learning to surrender our creations Chapter 2: HIVE MIND - Bees do it: distributed governance - The collective intelligence of a mob - Asymmetrical invisible hands - Decentralized remembering as an act of perception - More is more than more, it's different - Advantages and disadvantages of swarms - The network is the icon of the 21st century Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE - Entertaining machines with bodies - Fast, cheap and out of control - Getting smart from dumb things - The virtues of nested hierarchies - Using the real world to communicate - No intelligence without bodies - Mind/body black patch psychosis Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY - Biology: the future of machines - Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds - Random paths to a stable ecosystem - How to do everything at once - The Humpty Dumpty challenge Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION - What color is a chameleon on a mirror? - The unreasonable point of life - Poised in the persistent state of almost falling - Rocks are slow life - Cooperation without friendship or foresight Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX - Equilibrium is death - What came first, stability or diversity? - Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop - The origins of variation - Life immortal, ineradicable - Negentropy - The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL - In ancient Greece the first artificial self - Maturing of mechanical selfhood - The toilet: archetype of tautology - Self-causing agencies Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS - Bottled life, sealed with clasp - Mail-order Gaia - Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man - The very big ecotechnic terrarium - An experiment in sustained chaos - Another synthetic ecosystem, like California Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE - Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark - Migrating to urban weed - The deployment of intentional seasons - A cyclotron for the life sciences - The ultimate technology Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY - Pervasive round-the-clock plug in - Invisible intelligence - Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms - Programming a commonwealth - Closed-loop manufacturing - Technologies of adaptation Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS - Having your everything amputated - Instead of crunching, connecting - Factories of information - Your job: managing error - Connecting everything to everything Chapter 12: E-MONEY - Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins - The fax effect and the law of increasing returns - Superdistribution - Anything holding an electric charge will hold a fiscal charge - Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks - Fear of underwire economies Chapter 13: GOD GAMES - Electronic godhood - Theories with an interface - A god descends into his polygonal creation - The transmission of simulacra - Memorex warfare - Seamless distributed armies - A 10,000 piece hyperreality - The consensual ascii superorganism - Letting go to win Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM - An outing to the universal library - The space of all possible pictures - Travels in biomorph land - Harnessing the mutator - Sex in the library - Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps - Tunnelling through randomness Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION - Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine - What you can't engineer, evolution can - Mindless acts performed in parallel - Computational arms race - Taming wild evolution - Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules - Death is the best teacher - The algorithmic genius of ants - The end of engineering's hegemony Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL - Cartoon physics in toy worlds - Birthing a synthespian - Robots without hard bodies - The agents of ethnological architecture - Imposing destiny upon free will - Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald - Searching for co-control Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE - To enlarge the space of being - Primitives of visual possibilities - How to program happy accidents - All survive by hacking the rules - The handy-dandy tool of evolution - Hang-gliding into the game of life - Life verbs - Homesteading hyperlife territory Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE - The revolution of daily evolution - Bypassing the central dogma - The difference, if any, between learning and evolution - The evolution of evolution - The explanation of everything Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM - The incompleteness of Darwinian theory - Natural selection is not enough - Intersecting lines on the tree of life - The premise of non-random mutations - Even monsters follow rules - When the abstract is embodied - The essential clustering of life - DNA can't code for everything - An uncertain density of biological search space - Mathematics of natural selection Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS - Order for free - Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math - Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets - A question worth asking - Self-tuning vivisystems Chapter 21: RISING FLOW - A 4 billion year ponzi scheme - What evolution wants - Seven trends of hyper-evolution - Coyote trickster self-evolver Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY - Brains that catch baseballs - The flip side of chaos - Positive myopia - Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability - Operation Internal Look, Ahead - Varieties of prediction - Change in the service of non-change - Telling the future is what the systems are for - The many problems with global models - We are all steering Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES - What ever happened to cybernetics? - The holes in the web of scientific knowledge - To be astonished by the trivial - Hypertext: the end of authority - A new thinking space Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD - How to make something from nothing - Hijacking the universe TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Stewart Brand majored in biology at Stanford, where his teacher was Paul Ehrlich, a population biologist. Ehrlich too was fascinated by the rubbery chameleon-on-the-mirror paradox. He saw it most vividly in the relationship between a butterfly and its host plant. Fanatical butterfly collectors had long ago figured out that the best way to get perfect specimens was to encase a caterpillar, along with a plant it feeds on, in a box while waiting for the larvae to metamorphose. After transformation, the butterfly would emerge in the box sporting flawless unworn wings. It would be immediately killed and mounted. This method required that collectors figure out which plants butterflies ate. With the prospect of perfect specimens, they did this thoroughly. The result was a rich literature of plant/butterfly communities, whose summary indicated that many butterflies in the larvae stage chomp on only one specific plant. Monarch caterpillars, for instance, devour only milkweeds. And, it seemed, the milkweed invited only the monarch to dine on it. Ehrlich noticed that in this sense the butterfly was reflected in the plant, and the plant was reflected in the butterfly. Every step the milkweed took to keep the monarch larvae at bay so the worm wouldn't devour it completely, forced the monarch to "change colors" and devise a way to circumvent the plant's defenses. The mutual reflections became a dance of two chameleons belly to belly. In defending itself so thoroughly against the monarch, the milkweed became inseparable from the butterfly. And vice versa. Any long-term antagonistic relationship seemed to harbor this kind of codependency. In 1952, W. Ross Ashby, a cybernetician interested in how machines could learn, wrote, "[An organism's gene-pattern] does not specify in detail how a kitten shall catch a mouse, but provides a learning mechanism and a tendency to play, so that it is the mouse which teaches the kitten the finer points of how to catch mice." Ehrlich came across a word to describe this tightly coupled dance in the title of a 1958 paper by C. J. Mode in the journal Evolution. It was called "coevolution," as in "A mathematical model for the co-evolution of obligate parasites and their hosts." Like most biological observations, the notion of coevolution was not new. The amazing Darwin himself wrote of "coadaptions of organic beings to each other..." in his 1859 masterpiece Origin of Species. The formal definition of coevolution runs something like this: "Coevolution is reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species," says John Thompson in Interaction and Coevolution. But what actually happens is more like a tango. The milkweed and monarch, shoulder to shoulder, lock into a single system, an evolution toward and with each other. Every step of coevolutionary advance winds the two antagonists more inseparably, until each is wholly dependent on the other's antagonism. The two become one. Biochemist James Lovelock writes of this embrace, "The evolution of a species is inseparable from the evolution of its environment. The two processes are tightly coupled as a single indivisible process." Brand picked up the term and launched a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly. It was devoted to the larger notion of all things-biological, societal, and technological-adapting to and creating each other, and at the same time weaving into one whole system. As an introduction Brand penned a definition: "Evolution is adapting to meet one's needs. Coevolution, the larger view, is adapting to meet each other's needs." The "co" in coevolution is the mark of the future. In spite of complaints about the steady demise of interpersonal relationships, the lives of modern people are increasingly more codependent than ever. All politics these days means global politics and global politics means copolitics. The new online communities built between the spaces of communication networks are coworlds. Marshall McLuhan was not quite right. We are not hammering together a cozy global village. We are weaving together a crowded global hive-a coworld of utmost sociality and mirrorlike reciprocation. In this environment, all evolution, including the evolution of manufactured entities, is coevolution. Nothing changes without also moving closer to its changing neighbors. Nature is chock-a-block with coevolution. Every green corner sports parasites, symbionts, and tightly coupled dances. Biologist P. W. Price estimated that over 50 percent of today's species are parasitic. (The figure has risen from the deep paleologic past and is expected to keep rising.) Here's news: half of the living world is codependent! Business consultants commonly warn their clients against becoming a symbiont company dependent upon a single customer-company, or a single supplier. But many do, and as far as I can tell, live profitable lives, no shorter on average than other companies. The surge of alliance-making in the 1990s among large corporations-particularly among those in the information and network industries-is another facet of an increasing coevolutionary economic world. Rather than eat or compete with a competitor, the two form an alliance-a symbiosis. The parties in a symbiosis don't have to be symmetrical or even at parity. In fact, biologists have found that almost all symbiotic alliances in nature entail a greater advantage for one party-in effect some hint of parasitism-in every codependency. But even though one side gains at the expense of the other, both sides gain over all, and so the pact continues. In his magazine CoEvolution Brand began collecting stories of coevolutionary games. One of the most illustrative examples of alliance making in nature is the following: In eastern Mexico live a variety of acacia shrubs and marauding ants. Most acacias have thorns, bitter leaves, and other protection against a hungry world. One, the "swollen thorn acacia," learned to encourage a species of ant to monopolize it as a food source and kill or run off all other predators. Enticements gradually included nifty water-proof swollen thorns to live in, handy nectar fountains, and special ant-food buds at the leaf tips. The ants, whose interests increasingly coincided with the acacia's, learned to inhabit the thorns, patrol the acacia day and night, attack every acacia-hungry organism, and even prune away invading plants such as vines and tree seedlings that might shade Mother Acacia. The acacia gave up its bitter leaves, sharp thorns, and other devices and now requires the acacia-ant for survival. And the ant colonies can no longer live without the acacia. Together they're unbeatable. In evolutionary time, the instances of coevolution have increased as sociability in life has increased. The more copious life's social behaviors are, the more likely they are to be subverted into mutually beneficial interactions. The more mutually responsive we construct our economic and material world, the more coevolutionary games we'll see. Parasitic behavior itself is a new territory for organisms to make a living in. Thus we find parasites upon parasites. Ecologist John Thompson notes that "just as the richness of social behaviors may increase mutualism with other species, so may some mutualisms allow for the evolution of new social behaviors." In true coevolutionary fashion, coevolution breeds coevolution. A billion years from now life on Earth may be primarily social, and stuffed with parasites and symbionts; and the world economy may be primarily a crowded network of alliances. What happens, then, when coevolution saturates a complete planet? What does a sphere of reflecting, responsive, coadapting, and recursive bits of life looping back upon itself do? The butterfly and the milkweed constantly dance around each other, and by this ceaseless crazed ballet they move far beyond the forms they would have if they were at peace with each other. The chameleon on the mirror flipping without rest slips into some deranged state far from sanity. There is a sort of madness in pursuing self-reflections, that same madness we sensed in the nuclear arms race of post-World War II. Coevolution moves things to the absurd. The butterfly and the milkweed, although competitors in a way, cannot live apart. Paul Ehrlich sees coevolution pushing two competitors into "obligate cooperation." He wrote, "It's against the interests of either predator or prey to eliminate the enemy." That is clearly irrational, yet that is clearly a force that drives nature. When a human mind goes off the deep end and gets stuck in the spiral of watching itself watching a mirror, or becomes so dependent upon its enemies that it apes them, then we declare it insane. Yet there is a touch of insanity-a touch of the off-balance-in intelligence and consciousness itself. To some extent a mind, even a primitive mind, must watch itself. Must any consciousness stare at its own navel? This was the point in the conversation when Stewart Brand pointed out to Gregory Bateson his fine riddle of the chameleon on the mirror, and the two biologists swerved to follow it. The chase arrives at the odd conclusion that consciousness, life, intelligence, coevolution are off-balanced, unexpected, even unreasonable, given the resting point of everything else. We find intelligence and life spooky because they maintain a precarious state far from equilibrium. Compared to the rest of the universe, intelligence and consciousness and life are stable instabilities. They are held together, poised upright like a pencil standing on its point, by the recursive dynamics of coevolution. The butterfly pushes the milkweed, and the milkweed pushes the butterfly, and the harder they push the more impossible it becomes for them to let go, until the whole butterfly/milkweed thing emerges as its own being-a living insect/plant system-pulling itself up by its bootstraps. Rabid mutualism doesn't just happen in pairs. Threesomes can meld into an emergent, coevolutionarily wired symbiosis. Whole communities can be coevolutionary. In fact, any organism that adapts to organisms around it will act as an indirect coevolutionary agent to some degree. Since all organisms adapt that means all organisms in an ecosystem partake in a continuum of coevolution, from direct symbiosis to indirect mutual influence. The force of coevolutionism flows from one creature to its most intimate neighbors, and then ripples out in fainter waves until it immeasurably touches all living organisms. In this way the loose network of a billion species on this home planet are knit together so that unraveling the coevolutionary fabric becomes impossible, and the parts elevate themselves into some aggregate state of spooky, stable instability. The network of life on Earth, like all distributed being, transcends the life of its ingredients. But bully life reaches deeper and ties up the entire planet in the web of its network, also roping in the nonliving matrix of rock and gas into its coevolutionary antics. continue... Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 5: Coevolution Cheaper than printing it out: buy the paperback book. Out of Control Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN - Neo-biological civilization - The triumph of the bio-logic - Learning to surrender our creations Chapter 2: HIVE MIND - Bees do it: distributed governance - The collective intelligence of a mob - Asymmetrical invisible hands - Decentralized remembering as an act of perception - More is more than more, it's different - Advantages and disadvantages of swarms - The network is the icon of the 21st century Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE - Entertaining machines with bodies - Fast, cheap and out of control - Getting smart from dumb things - The virtues of nested hierarchies - Using the real world to communicate - No intelligence without bodies - Mind/body black patch psychosis Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY - Biology: the future of machines - Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds - Random paths to a stable ecosystem - How to do everything at once - The Humpty Dumpty challenge Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION - What color is a chameleon on a mirror? - The unreasonable point of life - Poised in the persistent state of almost falling - Rocks are slow life - Cooperation without friendship or foresight Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX - Equilibrium is death - What came first, stability or diversity? - Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop - The origins of variation - Life immortal, ineradicable - Negentropy - The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL - In ancient Greece the first artificial self - Maturing of mechanical selfhood - The toilet: archetype of tautology - Self-causing agencies Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS - Bottled life, sealed with clasp - Mail-order Gaia - Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man - The very big ecotechnic terrarium - An experiment in sustained chaos - Another synthetic ecosystem, like California Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE - Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark - Migrating to urban weed - The deployment of intentional seasons - A cyclotron for the life sciences - The ultimate technology Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY - Pervasive round-the-clock plug in - Invisible intelligence - Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms - Programming a commonwealth - Closed-loop manufacturing - Technologies of adaptation Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS - Having your everything amputated - Instead of crunching, connecting - Factories of information - Your job: managing error - Connecting everything to everything Chapter 12: E-MONEY - Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins - The fax effect and the law of increasing returns - Superdistribution - Anything holding an electric charge will hold a fiscal charge - Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks - Fear of underwire economies Chapter 13: GOD GAMES - Electronic godhood - Theories with an interface - A god descends into his polygonal creation - The transmission of simulacra - Memorex warfare - Seamless distributed armies - A 10,000 piece hyperreality - The consensual ascii superorganism - Letting go to win Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM - An outing to the universal library - The space of all possible pictures - Travels in biomorph land - Harnessing the mutator - Sex in the library - Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps - Tunnelling through randomness Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION - Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine - What you can't engineer, evolution can - Mindless acts performed in parallel - Computational arms race - Taming wild evolution - Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules - Death is the best teacher - The algorithmic genius of ants - The end of engineering's hegemony Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL - Cartoon physics in toy worlds - Birthing a synthespian - Robots without hard bodies - The agents of ethnological architecture - Imposing destiny upon free will - Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald - Searching for co-control Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE - To enlarge the space of being - Primitives of visual possibilities - How to program happy accidents - All survive by hacking the rules - The handy-dandy tool of evolution - Hang-gliding into the game of life - Life verbs - Homesteading hyperlife territory Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE - The revolution of daily evolution - Bypassing the central dogma - The difference, if any, between learning and evolution - The evolution of evolution - The explanation of everything Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM - The incompleteness of Darwinian theory - Natural selection is not enough - Intersecting lines on the tree of life - The premise of non-random mutations - Even monsters follow rules - When the abstract is embodied - The essential clustering of life - DNA can't code for everything - An uncertain density of biological search space - Mathematics of natural selection Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS - Order for free - Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math - Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets - A question worth asking - Self-tuning vivisystems Chapter 21: RISING FLOW - A 4 billion year ponzi scheme - What evolution wants - Seven trends of hyper-evolution - Coyote trickster self-evolver Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY - Brains that catch baseballs - The flip side of chaos - Positive myopia - Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability - Operation Internal Look, Ahead - Varieties of prediction - Change in the service of non-change - Telling the future is what the systems are for - The many problems with global models - We are all steering Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES - What ever happened to cybernetics? - The holes in the web of scientific knowledge - To be astonished by the trivial - Hypertext: the end of authority - A new thinking space Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD - How to make something from nothing - Hijacking the universe TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thirty years ago, biologists asked NASA to shoot a couple of unmanned probes towards the two likeliest candidates for extraterrestrial life, Mars and Venus, and poke a dipstick into their soil to check for vital signs. The life-meter that NASA came up with was a complicated, delicate (and expensive) contraption that would, upon landing, be sprinkled with a planet's soil and check for evidence of bacterial life. One of the consultants hired by NASA was a soft-spoken British biochemist, James Lovelock, who found that he had a better way of checking for life on planets, a method that did not require a multimillion-dollar gadget, or even a rocket at all. Lovelock was very rare breed in modern science. He practiced science as a maverick, working out of a stone barn among the rural hedgerows in Cornwall, England. He maintained a spotless scientific reputation, yet he had no formal institutional affiliation, a rarity in the heavily funded world of science. His stark independence both nurtured and demanded free thinking. In the early 1960s Lovelock came up with a radical proposal that irked the rest of the folks on the NASA probe team. They really wanted to land a meter on a another planet. He said they didn't have to bother. Lovelock told them he could determine whether there was life on a planet by looking through a telescope. He could measure the spectrum of a planet's atmosphere, and thereby determine its composition. The makeup of the bubble of gases surrounding a planet would yield the secret of whether life inhabited the sphere. You therefore didn't need to hurl an expensive canister across the solar system to find out. He already knew the answer. In 1967, Lovelock wrote two papers predicting that Mars would be lifeless based on his interpretation of its atmosphere. The NASA orbiters that circled Mars later in the decade, and the spectacular Mars soft landings the decade following made it clear to everyone that Mars was indeed as dead as Lovelock had forecasted. Equivalent probes to Venus brought back the same bad news: the solar system was barren outside of Earth. How did Lovelock know? Chemistry and coevolution. When the compounds in the Martian atmosphere and soil were energized by the sun's rays, and heated by the planetary core, and then contained by the Martian gravity, they settled into a dynamic equilibrium after millions of years. The ordinary laws of chemistry permit a scientist to make calculations of their reactions as if the planet were a large flask of matter. When a chemist derives the approximate formulas for Mars, Venus, and the other planets, the equations roughly balance: energy, compounds in; energy, compounds out. The measurements from the telescopes, and later the probes, matched the results predicted by the equations. Not so the Earth. The mixture of gases in the atmosphere of the Earth are way out of whack. And they are out of whack, Lovelock was to find out, because of the curious accumulative effects of coevolution. Oxygen in particular, at 21 percent, makes the Earth's atmosphere unstable. Oxygen is a highly reactive gas, combining with many elements in a fierce explosive union we call fire or burning. Thermodynamically, the high oxygen content of Earth's atmosphere should fall quickly as the gas oxidizes surface solids. Other reactive trace gases such as nitrous oxide and methyl iodide also remain at elevated and aberrant levels. Both oxygen and methane coexist, yet they are profoundly incompatible, or rather too compatible since they should burn each other up. Carbon dioxide is inexplicably a mere trace gas when it should be the bulk of the air, as it is on other planets. In addition to its atmosphere, the temperature and alkalinity of the Earth's surface also exhibits a queer level. The entire surface of the Earth seems to be a vast unstable chemical anomaly. It seemed to Lovelock as if an invisible power, an invisible hand, pushed the interacting chemical reactions into a raised state that should at any minute swing back to a balanced rest. The chemistry of Mars and Venus was as balanced as the periodic table, and as dead. The chemistry of the Earth was out of kilter, wholly unbalanced by the periodic table, and alive. From this, Lovelock concluded that any planet that has life would reveal a chemistry that held odd imbalances. A life-friendly atmosphere might not be oxygen-rich, but it should buck textbook equilibria. That invisible hand was coevolutionary life. Life in coevolution, which has the remarkable knack of generating stable instability, moved the chemical circuitry of the Earth's atmosphere into what Lovelock calls a "persistent state of disequilibrium." At any moment, the atmosphere should fall, but for millions of years it doesn't. Since high oxygen levels are needed for most microbial life, and since microbial fossils are billions of years old, this odd state of discordant harmony has been quite persistent and stable. The Earth's atmosphere seeks a steady oxygen level much as a thermostat hones in on a steady temperature. The uniform 20 percent oxygen level it has found turns out to be "fortuitous" as one scientist put it. Lower oxygen would be anemic, while greater oxygen would be too flammable. George R. Williams at the University of Toronto writes: "An O2 content of about 20 percent seems to ensure a balance between almost complete ventilation of the oceans without incurring greater risks of toxicity or increased combustibility of organic material." But where are the sensors and the thermostatic control mechanisms? For that matter, where is the furnace? Dead planets find equilibrium by geological circuits. Gases, such as carbon dioxide, dissolve in liquids and can precipitate out as solids. Only so much gas will dissolve before it reaches a natural saturation. Solids can release gases back into the atmosphere when heated and pressed by volcanic activity. Sedimentation, weathering, uplift-all the grand geological forces-also act as strong chemical agents, breaking and making the bonds of materials. Thermodynamic entropy draws all chemical reactions down to their minimal energy level. The furnace metaphor breaks down. Equilibrium on a dead planet is less like a thermostat and more like the uniform level of water in a bowl; it simply levels out when it can't get any lower. But the Earth has the self of a thermostat. A spontaneous circuit, provided by the coevolutionary tangle of life, which guides the chemicals of the planet toward some elevated potential. Presumably if all life on Earth were extinguished, the Earth's atmosphere would fall back to a persistent equilibrium, and become as boringly predictable as Mars and Venus. But as long as the distributed hand of life dominates, it will keep the chemicals of Earth off key. Yet the off-balance is itself balanced. The persistent disequilibrium that coevolutionary life generates, and that Lovelock seeks as an acid test for its presence, is stable in its own way. As far as we can tell Earth's atmospheric oxygen has remained at about 20 percent for hundreds of millions of years. The atmosphere acts not merely as an acrobat on a tightrope pitched far from the vertical, but as an acrobat teetering between tilting and falling, and poised there for millions of years. She never falls, but never gets out of falling. It's a state of permanent almost-fell. Lovelock recognized that persistent almost-fell is a hallmark of life. Recently complexity investigators have recognized that persistent almost-fell is a hallmark of any vivisystem: an economy, a natural ecosystem, a deep computer simulation, an immune system, or an evolutionary system. All share that paradoxical quality of working best when they remain poised in an Escher-like state of forever descending without ever being lowered. They remain poised in the act of collapsing. David Layzer, writing in his semiscientific book Cosmogenesis, argues that "the central property of life is not reproductive invariance, but reproductive instability." The key of life is its ability to reproduce slightly out of kilter rather than with exactitude. This almost-falling into chaos keeps life proliferating. A little noticed but central character of such vivisystems is that this paradoxical essence is contagious. Vivisystems spread their poised instability into whatever they touch, and they reach for everything. On Earth, life elbows its way into solid, liquid, gas. No rocks, to our knowledge, are untouched by life in former times. Tiny oceanic microorganisms solidify carbon and oxygen gases dissolved in sea water to produce a salt which settles on the sea floor. The deposits eventually become pressed under sedimentary weight into stone. Tiny plant organisms transport carbon from the air into soil and lower into the sea bottom, to be submerged and fossilized into oil. Life generates methane, ammonia, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and many other gases. Iron- and metal-concentrating bacteria create metallic ores. (Iron, the very emblem of nonlife, born of life!) Upon close inspection, geologists have concluded that all rocks residing on the Earth's surface (except perhaps volcanic lava) are recycled sediments, and therefore all rocks are biogenic in nature, that is, in some way affected by life. The relentless push and pull of coevolutionary life eventually brings into its game the abiotic stuff of the universe. It makes even the rocks part of its dancing mirror. continue... Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 5: Coevolution Cheaper than printing it out: buy the paperback book. Out of Control Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN - Neo-biological civilization - The triumph of the bio-logic - Learning to surrender our creations Chapter 2: HIVE MIND - Bees do it: distributed governance - The collective intelligence of a mob - Asymmetrical invisible hands - Decentralized remembering as an act of perception - More is more than more, it's different - Advantages and disadvantages of swarms - The network is the icon of the 21st century Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE - Entertaining machines with bodies - Fast, cheap and out of control - Getting smart from dumb things - The virtues of nested hierarchies - Using the real world to communicate - No intelligence without bodies - Mind/body black patch psychosis Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY - Biology: the future of machines - Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds - Random paths to a stable ecosystem - How to do everything at once - The Humpty Dumpty challenge Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION - What color is a chameleon on a mirror? - The unreasonable point of life - Poised in the persistent state of almost falling - Rocks are slow life - Cooperation without friendship or foresight Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX - Equilibrium is death - What came first, stability or diversity? - Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop - The origins of variation - Life immortal, ineradicable - Negentropy - The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL - In ancient Greece the first artificial self - Maturing of mechanical selfhood - The toilet: archetype of tautology - Self-causing agencies Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS - Bottled life, sealed with clasp - Mail-order Gaia - Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man - The very big ecotechnic terrarium - An experiment in sustained chaos - Another synthetic ecosystem, like California Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE - Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark - Migrating to urban weed - The deployment of intentional seasons - A cyclotron for the life sciences - The ultimate technology Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY - Pervasive round-the-clock plug in - Invisible intelligence - Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms - Programming a commonwealth - Closed-loop manufacturing - Technologies of adaptation Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS - Having your everything amputated - Instead of crunching, connecting - Factories of information - Your job: managing error - Connecting everything to everything Chapter 12: E-MONEY - Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins - The fax effect and the law of increasing returns - Superdistribution - Anything holding an electric charge will hold a fiscal charge - Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks - Fear of underwire economies Chapter 13: GOD GAMES - Electronic godhood - Theories with an interface - A god descends into his polygonal creation - The transmission of simulacra - Memorex warfare - Seamless distributed armies - A 10,000 piece hyperreality - The consensual ascii superorganism - Letting go to win Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM - An outing to the universal library - The space of all possible pictures - Travels in biomorph land - Harnessing the mutator - Sex in the library - Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps - Tunnelling through randomness Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION - Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine - What you can't engineer, evolution can - Mindless acts performed in parallel - Computational arms race - Taming wild evolution - Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules - Death is the best teacher - The algorithmic genius of ants - The end of engineering's hegemony Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL - Cartoon physics in toy worlds - Birthing a synthespian - Robots without hard bodies - The agents of ethnological architecture - Imposing destiny upon free will - Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald - Searching for co-control Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE - To enlarge the space of being - Primitives of visual possibilities - How to program happy accidents - All survive by hacking the rules - The handy-dandy tool of evolution - Hang-gliding into the game of life - Life verbs - Homesteading hyperlife territory Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE - The revolution of daily evolution - Bypassing the central dogma - The difference, if any, between learning and evolution - The evolution of evolution - The explanation of everything Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM - The incompleteness of Darwinian theory - Natural selection is not enough - Intersecting lines on the tree of life - The premise of non-random mutations - Even monsters follow rules - When the abstract is embodied - The essential clustering of life - DNA can't code for everything - An uncertain density of biological search space - Mathematics of natural selection Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS - Order for free - Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math - Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets - A question worth asking - Self-tuning vivisystems Chapter 21: RISING FLOW - A 4 billion year ponzi scheme - What evolution wants - Seven trends of hyper-evolution - Coyote trickster self-evolver Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY - Brains that catch baseballs - The flip side of chaos - Positive myopia - Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability - Operation Internal Look, Ahead - Varieties of prediction - Change in the service of non-change - Telling the future is what the systems are for - The many problems with global models - We are all steering Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES - What ever happened to cybernetics? - The holes in the web of scientific knowledge - To be astonished by the trivial - Hypertext: the end of authority - A new thinking space Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD - How to make something from nothing - Hijacking the universe TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS One of the first to articulate the transcendent view that life directly shaped the physicality of this planet was the Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, writing in 1926. Vernadsky tallied up the billions of organisms on Earth and considered their collective impact upon the material resources of the planet. He called this grand system of resources the "biosphere," (although Eduard Suess had coined the term a few years earlier) and set out to measure it quantitatively in his book The Biosphere, a volume only recently translated into English. In articulating life as a chameleon on a rocky mirror, Vernadsky committed heresy on two counts. He enraged biologists by considering the biosphere of living creatures as a large chemical factory. Plants and animals were mere temporary chemical storage units for the massive flow of minerals around the world. "Living matter is a specific kind of rock...an ancient and, at the same time, an eternally young rock," Vernadsky wrote. Living creatures were delicate shells to hold these minerals. "The purpose of animals," he once said of their locomotion and movement, "is to assist the wind and waves to stir the brewing biosphere." At the same time, Vernadsky enraged geologists by considering rocks as if they were half-alive. Since the genesis of every rock was in life, their gradual interaction with living organisms meant that rocks were the part of life that moved the slowest. The mountains, the waters of the ocean, and the gases of the sky were very slow life. Naturally, geologists balked at this apparent mysticism. The two heresies melded into a beautiful symmetry. Life as ever-renewing mineral, and minerals as slow life. They could only be opposite sides of a single coin. The two sides of this equation cannot be mathematically unraveled; they are one system: lizard-mirror, plant/insect, rock-life, and now in modern times, human/machine. The organism behaves as environment, the environment behaves as organism. This has been a venerable idea at the edge of science for at least several hundred years. Many evolutionary biologists in the last century such as T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Darwin, too, understood it intuitively-that the physical environment shapes its creatures and the creatures shape their environment, and if considered in the long view, the environment is the organism and the organism is the environment. Alfred Lotka, an early theoretical biologist, wrote in 1925, "It is not so much the organism or the species that evolves, but the entire system, species plus environment. The two are inseparable." The entire system of evolving life and planet was coevolution, the dance of the chameleon on the mirror. If life were to vanish from Earth, Vernadsky realized, not only would the planet sink back into the "chemical calm" of an equilibrium state, but the clay deposits, limestone caves, ores in mine, chalk cliffs, and the very structure of all that we consider the Earth's landscape would retreat. "Life is not an external and accidental development on the terrestrial surface. Rather, it is intimately related with the constitution of the Earth's crust," Vernadsky wrote in 1929. "Without life, the face of the Earth would become as motionless and inert as the face of the moon." Three decades later, free-thinker James Lovelock arrived at the same conclusions based on his telescopic analysis of other planets. Lovelock observed, "In no way do organisms simply 'adapt' to a dead world determined by physics and chemistry alone. They live in a world that is the breath and bones of their ancestors and that they are now sustaining." Lovelock had more complete knowledge of early Earth than was available to Vernadsky, and a slightly better understanding of the global patterns of gases and material flows on Earth. All this led him to suggest in complete seriousness that "the air we breathe, the oceans, and the rocks are all either the direct products of living organisms or else have been greatly modified by their presence." Such a remarkable conclusion was foreshadowed by the French natural philosopher, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1800 had even less information about planetary dynamics than Vernadsky did. As a biologist, Lamarck was equal to Darwin. He, not Darwin, was the true discoverer of evolution, but Lamarck is stuck with an undeserved reputation as a loser, in part because he relied a little too much on intuition rather than the modern notion of detailed facts. Lamarck made an intuitive guess about the biosphere and again was prescient. Since there wasn't a shred of scientific evidence to support Lamarck's claims at the time, his observations were not influential. He wrote in 1802, "Complex mineral substances of all kinds that constitute the external crust of the Earth occurring in the form of individual accumulations, ore bodies, parallel strata, etc., and forming lowlands, hills, valleys, and mountains, are exclusively products of the animals and plants that existed within these areas of the Earth's surface." The bold claims of Lamarck, Vernadsky, and Lovelock seem ludicrous at first, but in the calculus of lateral causality make fine sense: that all we can see around us-the snow-covered Himalayas, the deep oceans east and west, vistas of rolling hills, awesome painted desert canyons, game-filled valleys-are all as much the product of life as the honeycomb. Lovelock kept gazing into the mirror and finding that it was nearly bottomless. As he examined the biosphere in succeeding years, he added more complex phenomena to the list of life-made. Some examples: plankton in the oceans release a gas (DMS) which oxidizes to produce submicroscopic aerosols of sulfate salts which form nuclei for the condensation of cloud droplets. Thus perhaps even clouds and rain may be biogenic. Summer thunderstorms may be life raining on itself. Some studies hinted that a majority of nuclei in snow crystals may be decayed vegetation, bacteria, or fungi spores; and so snow may be largely life-triggered. Only very little could escape life's imprint. "It may be that the core of our planet is unchanged as a result of life; but it would be unwise to assume it," Lovelock said. "Living matter is the most powerful geological force," Vernadsky claimed, "and it is growing with time." The more life, the greater its material force. Humans intensify life further. We harness fossil energy and breathe life into machines. Our entire manufactured infrastructure-as an extension of our own bodies-becomes part of a wider, global-scale life. As the carbon dioxide from our industry pours into the air and alters the global air mix, the realm of our artificial machines also becomes part of the planetary life. Jonathan Weiner writing in The Next One Hundred Years then can rightly say, "The Industrial Revolution was an astonishing geological event." If rocks are slow life, then our machines are quicker slow life. The Earth as mother was an old and comforting notion. But the Earth as mechanical device has been a harder idea to swallow. Vernadsky came very close to Lovelock's epiphany that the Earth's biosphere exhibits a regulation beyond chemical equilibrium. Vernadsky noted that "organisms exhibit a type of self-government" and that the biosphere seemed to be self-governed, but Vernadsky didn't press further because the crucial concept of self- government as a purely mechanical process had not yet been uncovered. How could a mere machine control itself? We now know that self-control and self-governance are not mystical vital spirits found only in life because we have built machines that contain them. Rather, control and purpose are purely logical processes that can emerge in any sufficiently complex medium, including that of iron gears and levers, or even complex chemical pathways. If a thermostat or a steam engine can own self-governance, the idea of a planet evolving such graceful feedback circuits is not so alien. Lovelock brought an engineer's sensibilities to the analysis of Mother Earth. He was a tinkerer, inventor, patent holder, and had worked for the biggest engineering firm of all time, NASA. In 1972, Lovelock offered a hypothesis of where the planet's self-government lay. He wrote, "The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent part." Lovelock called this view Gaia. Together with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, the two published the view in 1972 so that it could be critiqued on scientific terms. Lovelock says, "The Gaia theory is a bit stronger than coevolution," at least as biologists use the word. A pair of coevolutionary creatures chasing each other in an escalating arms race can only seem to veer out of control. Likewise, a pair of cozy coevolutionary symbionts embracing each other can only seem to lead to stagnant solipsism. But Lovelock saw that if you had a vast network of coevolutionary impulses, such that no creatures could escape creating its own substrate and the substrate its own creatures, then the web of coevolution spread around until it closed a circuit of self-making and self-control. The "obligate cooperation" of Ehrlich's coevolution-whether of mutual enemies or mutual partners-cannot only raise an emergent cohesion out of the parts, but this cohesion can actively temper its own extremes and thereby seek its own survival. The solidarity produced by a planetary field of creatures mirrored in a coevolving environment and each other is what Lovelock means by Gaia. Many biologists (including Paul Ehrlich) are unhappy with the idea of Gaia because Lovelock expanded the definition of life without asking their permission. He unilaterally enlarged life's scope to include a predominantly mechanical apparatus. In one easy word, a solid planet became "the largest manifestation of life" that we know. It is an odd beast: 99.9 percent rock, a lot of water, and a little air, wrapped up in the thinnest green film that would stretch around it. But if Earth is reduced to the size of a bacteria, and inspected under high-powered optics, would it seem stranger than a virus? Gaia hovers there, a blue sphere under the stark light, inhaling energy, regulating its internal states, fending off disturbances, complexifying, and ready to transform another planet if given a chance. While Lovelock backs off earlier assertions that Gaia is an organism, or acts as if it is one, he maintains that it really is a system that has living characteristics. It is a vivisystem. It is a system that is alive, whether or not it possesses all the attributes needed for an organism. That Gaia is made up of many purely mechanical circuits shouldn't deter us from applying the label of life. After all, cells are mostly chemical cycles. Some ocean diatoms are mostly inert, crystallized calcium. Trees are mostly dead pulp. But they are still living organisms. Gaia is a bounded whole. As a living system, its inert, mechanistic parts are part of its life. Lovelock: "There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth's surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the material environment of the rocks and atmosphere to the living cells." Somewhere at the boundary of Gaia, either in the rarefied airs of the stratosphere or deep in the Earth's molten core, the effects of life fade. No one can say where that line is, if there is a line. continue... Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 5: Coevolution Cheaper than printing it out: buy the paperback book. Out of Control Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN - Neo-biological civilization - The triumph of the bio-logic - Learning to surrender our creations Chapter 2: HIVE MIND - Bees do it: distributed governance - The collective intelligence of a mob - Asymmetrical invisible hands - Decentralized remembering as an act of perception - More is more than more, it's different - Advantages and disadvantages of swarms - The network is the icon of the 21st century Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE - Entertaining machines with bodies - Fast, cheap and out of control - Getting smart from dumb things - The virtues of nested hierarchies - Using the real world to communicate - No intelligence without bodies - Mind/body black patch psychosis Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY - Biology: the future of machines - Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds - Random paths to a stable ecosystem - How to do everything at once - The Humpty Dumpty challenge Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION - What color is a chameleon on a mirror? - The unreasonable point of life - Poised in the persistent state of almost falling - Rocks are slow life - Cooperation without friendship or foresight Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX - Equilibrium is death - What came first, stability or diversity? - Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop - The origins of variation - Life immortal, ineradicable - Negentropy - The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL - In ancient Greece the first artificial self - Maturing of mechanical selfhood - The toilet: archetype of tautology - Self-causing agencies Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS - Bottled life, sealed with clasp - Mail-order Gaia - Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man - The very big ecotechnic terrarium - An experiment in sustained chaos - Another synthetic ecosystem, like California Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE - Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark - Migrating to urban weed - The deployment of intentional seasons - A cyclotron for the life sciences - The ultimate technology Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY - Pervasive round-the-clock plug in - Invisible intelligence - Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms - Programming a commonwealth - Closed-loop manufacturing - Technologies of adaptation Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS - Having your everything amputated - Instead of crunching, connecting - Factories of information - Your job: managing error - Connecting everything to everything Chapter 12: E-MONEY - Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins - The fax effect and the law of increasing returns - Superdistribution - Anything holding an electric charge will hold a fiscal charge - Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks - Fear of underwire economies Chapter 13: GOD GAMES - Electronic godhood - Theories with an interface - A god descends into his polygonal creation - The transmission of simulacra - Memorex warfare - Seamless distributed armies - A 10,000 piece hyperreality - The consensual ascii superorganism - Letting go to win Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM - An outing to the universal library - The space of all possible pictures - Travels in biomorph land - Harnessing the mutator - Sex in the library - Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps - Tunnelling through randomness Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION - Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine - What you can't engineer, evolution can - Mindless acts performed in parallel - Computational arms race - Taming wild evolution - Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules - Death is the best teacher - The algorithmic genius of ants - The end of engineering's hegemony Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL - Cartoon physics in toy worlds - Birthing a synthespian - Robots without hard bodies - The agents of ethnological architecture - Imposing destiny upon free will - Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald - Searching for co-control Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE - To enlarge the space of being - Primitives of visual possibilities - How to program happy accidents - All survive by hacking the rules - The handy-dandy tool of evolution - Hang-gliding into the game of life - Life verbs - Homesteading hyperlife territory Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE - The revolution of daily evolution - Bypassing the central dogma - The difference, if any, between learning and evolution - The evolution of evolution - The explanation of everything Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM - The incompleteness of Darwinian theory - Natural selection is not enough - Intersecting lines on the tree of life - The premise of non-random mutations - Even monsters follow rules - When the abstract is embodied - The essential clustering of life - DNA can't code for everything - An uncertain density of biological search space - Mathematics of natural selection Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS - Order for free - Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math - Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets - A question worth asking - Self-tuning vivisystems Chapter 21: RISING FLOW - A 4 billion year ponzi scheme - What evolution wants - Seven trends of hyper-evolution - Coyote trickster self-evolver Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY - Brains that catch baseballs - The flip side of chaos - Positive myopia - Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability - Operation Internal Look, Ahead - Varieties of prediction - Change in the service of non-change - Telling the future is what the systems are for - The many problems with global models - We are all steering Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES - What ever happened to cybernetics? - The holes in the web of scientific knowledge - To be astonished by the trivial - Hypertext: the end of authority - A new thinking space Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD - How to make something from nothing - Hijacking the universe TABLE OF CONTENTS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, A - L ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, M - Z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The trouble with Gaia, as far as most skeptics are concerned, is that it makes a dead planet into a "smart" machine. We already are stymied in trying to design an artificial learning machine from inert computers, so the prospect of artificial learning evolving unbidden at a planetary scale seems ludicrous. But learning is overrated as something difficult to evolve. This may have to do with our chauvinistic attachment to learning as an exclusive mark of our species. There is a strong sense, which I hope to demonstrate in this book, in which evolution itself is a type of learning. Therefore learning occurs wherever evolution is, even if artificially. The dethronement of learning is one of the most exciting intellectual frontiers we are now crossing. In a virtual cyclotron, learning is being smashed into its primitives. Scientists are cataloguing the elemental components for adaptation, induction, intelligence, evolution, and coevolution into a periodic table of life. The particles for learning lie everywhere in all inert media, waiting to be assembled (and often self-assembled) into something that surges and quivers. Coevolution is a variety of learning. Stewart Brand wrote in CoEvolution Quarterly: "Ecology is a whole system, alright, but coevolution is a whole system in time. The health of it is forward-systemic self-education which feeds on constant imperfection. Ecology maintains. Coevolution learns." Colearning might be a better term for what coevolving creatures do. Coteaching also works, for the participants in coevolution are both learning and teaching each other at the same time. (We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.) The give and take of a coevolutionary relationship-teaching and learning at once-reminded many scientists of game playing. A simple child's game such as "Which hand is the penny in?" takes on the recursive logic of a chameleon on a mirror as the hider goes through this open-ended routine: "I just hid the penny in my right hand, and now the guesser will think it's in my left, so I'll move it into my right. But she also knows that I know she knows that, so I'll keep it in my left." Since the guesser goes through a similar process, the players form a system of mutual second-guessing. The riddle "What hand is the penny in?" is related to the riddle, "What color is the chameleon on a mirror?" The bottomless complexity which grows out of such simple rules intrigued John von Neumann, the mathematician who developed programmable logic for a computer in the early 1940s, and along with Wiener and Bateson launched the field of cybernetics. Von Neumann invented a mathematical theory of games. He defined a game as a conflict of interests resolved by the accumulative choices players make while trying to anticipate each other. He called his 1944 book (coauthored by economist Oskar Morgenstern) Theory of Games and Economic Behavior because he perceived that economies possessed a highly coevolutionary and gamelike character, which he hoped to illuminate with simple game dynamics. The price of eggs, say, is determined by mutual second-guessing between seller and buyer-how much will he accept, how much does he think I will offer, how much less than what I am willing to pay should I offer? The aspect von Neumann found amazing was that this infinite regress of mutual bluffing, codeception, imitation, reflection, and "game playing" would commonly settle down to a definite price, rather than spiral on forever. Even in a stock market made of thousands of mutual second-guessing agents, the group of conflicting interests would quickly settle on a price that was fairly stable. Von Neumann was particularly interested in seeing if he could develop optimal strategies for these kinds of mutual games, because at first glance they seemed almost insolvable in theory. As an answer he came up with a theory of games. Researchers at the U.S. government-funded RAND corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, extended von Neumann's initial work and eventually catalogued four basic varieties of mutual second-guessing games. Each variety had a different structure of rewards for winning, losing, or drawing. The four simple games were called "social dilemmas" in the technical literature, but could be thought of as the four building blocks of complicated coevolutionary games. They were: Chicken, Stag Hunt, Deadlock, and the Prisoner's Dilemma Chicken is the game played by teenage daredevils. Two cars race toward a cliff's edge; the driver who jumps out last, wins. Stag Hunt is the dilemma faced by a bunch of hunters who must cooperate to kill a stag, but may do better sneaking off by themselves to hunt a rabbit if no one cooperates. Do they gamble on cooperation (high payoff) or defection (low, but sure payoff)? Deadlock is a boring game where mutual defection pays best. The last one, the Prisoner's Dilemma, is the most illuminating, and became the guinea pig model for over 200 published social psychology experiments in the late 1960s. The Prisoner's Dilemma, invented in 1950 by Merrill Flood at RAND, is a game for two separately held prisoners who must independently decide whether to deny or confess to a crime. If both confess, each will be fined. If neither confesses, both go free. But if only one should confess, he is rewarded while the other is fined. Cooperation pays, but so does betrayal, if played right. What would you do? Played only once, betrayal of the other is the soundest choice. But when two "prisoners" played the game over and over, learning from each other-a game known as the Iterated Prisoner Dilemma-the dynamics of the game shifted. The other player could not be dismissed; he demanded to be attended to, either as obligate enemy or obligate colleague. This tight mutual destiny closely paralleled the coevolutionary relationship of political enemies, business competitors, or biological symbionts. As study of this simple game progressed, the larger question became, What were the strategies of play for the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma that resulted in the highest scores over the long term? And what strategies succeeded when played against many varieties of players, from the ruthless to the kind? In 1980, Robert Axelrod, a political science professor at University of Michigan, ran a tournament pitting 14 submitted strategies of Prisoner's Dilemma against each other in a round robin to see which one would triumph. The winner was a very simple strategy crafted by psychologist Anatol Rapoport called Tit-For-Tat. The Tit-For-Tat strategy prescribed reciprocating cooperation for cooperation, and defection for defection, and tended to engender periods of cooperation. Axelrod had discovered that "the shadow of the future," cast by playing a game repeatedly rather than once, encouraged cooperation, because it made sense for a player to cooperate now in order to ensure cooperation from others later. This glimpse of cooperation set Axelrod on this quest: "Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority?" For centuries, the orthodox political reasoning originally articulated by Thomas Hobbes in 1651 was dogma: that cooperation could only develop with the help of a benign central authority. Without top-down government, Hobbes claimed, there would be only collective selfishness. A strong hand had to bring forth political altruism, whatever the tone of economics. But the democracies of the West, beginning with the American and French Revolutions, suggested that societies with good communications could develop cooperative structures without heavy central control. Cooperation can emerge out of self-interest. In our postindustrial economy, spontaneous cooperation is a regular occurrence. Widespread industry-initiated standards (both of quality and protocols such as 110 volts or ASCII) and the rise of the Internet, the largest working anarchy in the world, have only intensified interest in the conditions necessary for hatching coevolutionary cooperation. This cooperation is not a new age spiritualism. Rather it is what Axelrod calls "cooperation without friendship or foresight"-cold principles of nature that work at many levels to birth a self-organizing structure. Sort of cooperation whether you want it or not. Games such as Prisoner's Dilemma can be played by any kind of adaptive agent-not just humans. Bacteria, armadillos, or computer transistors can make choices according to various reward schemes, weighing immediate sure gain over future greater but riskier gain. Played over time with the same partners, the results are both a game and a type of coevolution. Every complex adaptive organization faces a fundamental tradeoff. A creature must balance perfecting a skill or trait (building up legs to run faster) against experimenting with new traits (wings). It can never do all things at once. This daily dilemma is labeled the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Axelrod makes an analogy with a hospital: "On average you can expect a new medical drug to have a lower payoff than exploiting an established medication to its limits. But if you gave every patient the current best drug, you'd never get proven new drugs. From an individual's point of view you should never do the exploration. But from the society of individuals' point of view, you ought to try some experiments." How much to explore (gain for the future) versus how much to exploit (sure bet now) is the game a hospital has to play. Living organisms have a similar tradeoff in deciding how much mutation and innovation is needed to keep up with a changing environment. When they play the tradeoff against a sea of other creatures making similar tradeoffs, it becomes a coevolutionary game. Axelrod's 14-player Prisoner's Dilemma round robin tournament was played on a computer. In 1987, Axelrod extended the computerization of the game by setting up a system in which small populations of programs played randomly generated Prisoner's Dilemma strategies. Each random strategy would be scored after a round of playing against all the other strategies running; the ones with the highest scores got copied the most to the next generation, so that the most successful strategies propagated. Because many strategies could succeed only by "preying" on other strategies, they would thrive only as long as their prey survived. This leads to the oscillating dynamics found everywhere in the wilds of nature; how fox and hare populations rise and fall over the years in coevolutionary circularity. When the hares increase the foxes boom; when the foxes boom, the hares die off. But when there are no hares, the foxes starve. When there are less foxes, the hares increase. And when the hares increase the foxes do too, and so on. In 1990, Kristian Lindgren, working at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, expanded these coevolutionary experiments by increasing the population of players to 1,000, introducing random noise into the games, and letting this artificial coevolution run for up to 30,000 generations. Lindgren found that masses of dumb agents playing Prisoner's Dilemma not only reenacted the ecological oscillations of fox and hare, but the populations also created many other natural phenomenon such as parasitism, spontaneously emerging symbiosis, and long-term stable coexistence between species, as if they were an ecology. Lindgren's work excited some biologists because his very long runs displayed long periods when the mix of different "species" of strategy was very stable. These historical epochs were interrupted by very sudden, short-lived episodes of instability, when old species went extinct and new ones took root. Quickly a new stable arrangement of new species of strategies arose and persisted for many thousands of generations. This motif matches the general pattern of evolution found in earthly fossils, a pattern known in the evolutionary trade as punctuated equilibrium, or "punk eek" for short. One marvelous result from these experiments bears consideration by anyone hoping to manage coevolutionary forces. It's another law of the gods. It turns out that no matter what clever strategy you engineer or evolve in a world laced by chameleon-on-a-mirror loops, if it is applied as a perfectly pure rule that you obey absolutely, it will not be evolutionary resilient to competing strategies. That is, a competing strategy will figure out how to exploit your rule in the long run. A little touch of randomness (mistakes, imperfections), on the other hand, actually creates long-term stability in coevolutionary worlds by allowing some strategies to prevail for relative eons by not being so easily aped. Without noise-wholly unexpected and out-of-character choices-the opportunity for escalating evolution is lost because there are not enough periods of stability to keep the system going. Error keeps the glue of coevolutionary relationships from binding too tightly into runaway death spirals, and therefore error keeps a coevolutionary system afloat and moving forward. Honor thy error. Playing coevolutionary games in computers has provided other lessons. One of the few notions from game theory to penetrate the popular culture was the distinction of zero-sum and nonzero-sum games. Chess, elections, races, and poker are zero-sum games: the winner's earnings are deducted from the loser's assets. Natural wilderness, the economy, a mind, and networks on the other hand, are nonzero-sum games. Wolverines don't have to lose just because bears live. The highly connected loops of coevolutionary conflict mean the whole can reward (or at times cripple) all members. Axelrod told me, "One of the earliest and most important insights from game theory was that nonzero-sum games had very different strategic implications than zero-sum games. In zero-sum games whatever hurts the other guy is good for you. In nonzero-sum games you can both do well, or both do poorly. I think people often take a zero-sum view of the world when they shouldn't. They often say, 'Well I'm doing better than the other guy, therefore I must be doing well.' In a nonzero-sum you could be doing better than the other guy and both be doing terribly." Axelrod noticed that the champion Tit-For-Tat strategy always won without exploiting an opponent's strategy-it merely mirrored the other's actions. Tit-For-Tat could not beat anyone's strategy one on one, but in a nonzero-sum game it would still win a tournament because it had the highest cumulative score when played against many kinds of rules. As Axelrod pointed out to William Poundstone, author of Prisoner's Dilemma, "That's a very bizarre idea. You can't win a chess tournament by never beating anybody." But with coevolution-change changing in response to itself-you can win without beating others. Hard-nosed CEOs in the business world now recognize that in the era of networks and alliances, companies can make billions without beating others. Win-win, the cliché is called. Win-win is the story of life in coevolution. Sitting in his book-lined office, Robert Axelrod mused on the consequences of understanding coevolution and then added, "I hope my work on the evolution of cooperation helps the world avoid conflict. If you read the citation which the National Academy of Science gave me," he said pointing to a plaque on the wall, "they think it helped avoid nuclear war." Although von Neumann was a key figure in the development of the atom bomb, he did not formally apply his own theories to the gamelike politics of the nuclear arms race. But after von Neumann's death in 1957, strategists in military think tanks began using his game theory to analyze the cold war, which had taken on the flavor of a coevolutionary "obligate cooperation" between two superpower enemies. Gorbachev had a fundamental coevolutionary insight, says Axelrod. "He saw that the Soviets could get more security with fewer tanks rather than with more tanks. Gorbi unilaterally threw away 10,000 tanks, and that made it harder for US and Europe to have a big military budget, which helped get this whole process going that ended the cold war." Perhaps the most useful lesson of coevolution for "wannabe" gods is that in coevolutionary worlds control and secrecy are counterproductive. You can't control, and revelation works better than concealment. "In zero-sum games you always try to hide your strategy," says Axelrod. "But in nonzero-sum games you might want to announce your strategy in public so the other players need to adapt to it." Gorbachev's strategy was effective because he did it publicly; unilaterally withdrawing in secret would have done nothing. The chameleon on the mirror is a completely open system. Neither the lizard nor the glass has any secrets. The grand closure of Gaia keeps cycling because all its lesser cycles inform each other in constant coevolutionary communication. From the collapse of Soviet command-style economies, we know that open information keeps an economy stable and growing. Coevolution can be seen as two parties snared in the web of mutual propaganda. Coevolutionary relationships, from parasites to allies, are in their essence informational. A steady exchange of information welds them into a single system. At the same time, the exchange-whether of insults or assistance or plain news-creates a commons from which cooperation, self-organization, and win-win endgames can spawn. In the Network Era-that age we have just entered-dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization, and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error. continue...