Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems (MIT Press) - Essential Guide for Researchers, Engineers & System Designers

Professor John H. Holland's Signals and Boundaries is the third volume of the trilogy I reviewed today that describe how living things are created, adapt, and change in their natural environment. This book is a bit more technical than the previous two works that I reviewed today, Emergence, From Chaos to Order, and Hidden Order, How Adaptation Builds Complexity. All three of Prof. Holland's works can be seen as a three legged table on which understanding of the progression of life forms themselves can be visualized, modeled, and ultimately understood. Signals and boundaries are as Prof.Holland describes as the building blocks of complex adaptive systems; and indeed that is exactly what they are there like little Lego blocks that serve different purposes and functions depending upon the physical environment in which they are utilized, where signals can be visualized as purpose shaped receptors and probes, the way puzzle pieces interlock once they come into contact with one another. They are both the attractive and interactive components of living things, keys and locks as it were. Boundaries are the natural and system-created constraints that are placed on organisms to guide facilitate organisms that are capable with interacting with one another, and to exclude those that cannot. They can be compared with a fish weir, trapping those that are desirable, and excluding those that are not programmed through biochemical compatibility, to proceed onto the next step in adaptation and creation. Signals and boundaries on the signposts of evolution. Those life forms that succeed do so because the signals they both admit and receive to facilitate interaction are hemmed in by boundaries that would otherwise dilute the pool of organisms in which they exist to a point where from a probabilistic standpoint, sufficient interactions to result in replication, might not occur at all. A commonly used example is where a population of animals that is so close to extinction as to be incapable of reproducing sufficient numbers of themselves ultimately die out. Boundaries keep the interlopers out allowing the entities programmed for success to meet and greet one another on what is actually a random basis human society reflects these behaviors in our courtship and dating rituals. It is the basis of arranged marriages in some parts of the world, and the dating scene in more diverse societies. The fact that this occurs at the biochemical level is not well understood; but it bears more than just a familial relationship at the various levels of complexities. Those complexities exist in hierarchical forms that closely resemble the patterned organization that exists above and below each of the levels under consideration, just as human society does. More recently, a new and more specialized form of mathematics, called fractals, have been successfully employed to both illustrate and describe these phenomena. Altogether, it is fascinating, even for someone like myself with mathematical skills or marginal compared with those of whom Prof. Holland writes about. Nonetheless, he gets his point across very well. More importantly, I found the book sufficiently worthwhile to spend 4 or 5 evenings outlining and summarizing the central themes of Prof. Holland's narrative. I think it is that important to have made that special effort to fully and completely understand what I am reading. Once the central ideas are mastered, the rest follow suit it is why diversity is present, despite the constraints of institutional boundaries. Once we know how the system works, it becomes a lot easier to to be able to predict where things are likely to go, while at the same time understanding that the products of emergence resulting from these interactions can be entirely unpredictable.