Butterfly Wings

Brian Klaas, associate professor of global politics at University College, London, revels in the mysteries of causality and how poorly most people understand them.

Causality

People like to reduce complex reality to simple patterns of causes and effects. This view ignores most of the details of causality. Any event results from interactions among a seemingly infinite array of conditions. However, people generally overlook the vast web of influences that lead up to random events. In today’s interconnected societies, the smallest events can unleash enormous consequences.

You’re the culmination of a nearly infinite web of events, arranged with just the right strands and interlocking pattern to produce your existence.Brian Klaas

To survive in the distant past, Klaas explains, humans learned to filter out nonessential stimuli to assess the variables of a situation. People still perceive reality this way. Your brain prioritizes phenomena that form patterns. Humans instinctively break information down into clear-cut relationships: Clouds mean rain, saber-tooth tigers mean death.

Sir Isaac Newton, who unlocked the natural laws that underlie such phenomena as the behavior of moving objects, fueled the belief that events converge. Mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace speculated that with universal physical laws in place, a theoretical omniscient being who knew the position of every object in the universe could accurately foretell everything that would happen in the future. 

Nature and evolution demonstrate striking examples of convergence. Life-forms emerge from a range of distinct evolutionary tracks. Even living beings as different as squid and human beings developed eyes that function in surprisingly similar ways. Convergence may occur because some problems have only a limited number of solutions.

Contingency

The contingent view of reality holds that everything in the universe, past and present, connects in a vast web. Every action, even every thought, influences that web.

As these influences ripple out across time and space, they modify the trajectories of everything they encounter. For example, humanity can trace its origin to the accidental merger of two single-celled organisms some two billion years ago. This fluke was never repeated, but, as Klaas reports, it gave birth to every complex form of life on Earth.

Such random changes drive evolution. Darwin deduced that random variations in the traits of living organisms – such as the different sizes and shapes of birds’ beaks – were the guiding manifestation of evolution. An individual organism whose traits successfully support survival lives long enough to pass those traits along to future generations. Darwin never figured out the mechanism by which variations occur. Nearly a century after his death, scientists discovered that copies of DNA can contain mutations that produce new traits.

We control nothing, but influence everything.Brian Klaas

In the 20th century, meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz built a computer program to provide models of weather systems. The program ran weather simulations using a few simple variables. Lorenz attempted to rerun a particular simulation, but because of a rounding error, the second simulation began with a wind speed that differed from the original by only 0.000127 miles per hour. To Lorenz’s surprise, the second simulation proved profoundly different from the first one.

Lorenz, a pioneer of chaos theory, observed that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can lead to a tornado in Texas. As he illustrated with this metaphor, systems such as the weather are so contingent on the details of their initial conditions that even a small change in those conditions can produce unpredictable effects. Similarly, the uncountable interactions among atomic particles make the entire universe unpredictable. And, similarly, your life is contingent on the actions of every other person.

In today’s world, people experience local stability because the patterns of their daily lives are more predictable than anyone’s in prehistory. They suffer less isolation, and many groups’ cultures and customs converge. Yet global instability is high, and the world can change quickly as a result of shocks such as financial crashes, pandemics, and wars.

Modern humans live in the most ordered societies that have ever existed, but our world is also more prone to disarray and disorder than any other social environment in the history of humanity.

Complex systems consist of disparate but interrelated parts. When you change one aspect of the system, the other parts spontaneously adjust. An order emerges — a self-organizing order evident in such systems as traffic flow, stock markets, and locust swarms. The order results from countless individual actions and adjustments.

In one dramatic example, a single person who contracted a COVID-19 infection in Wuhan, China, led to a worldwide pandemic.

Uncertainty

The unprecedented predictive power of data, analytics, and machine learning leads people in modern society to suffer from an illusion of being in control. This fuels a tendency to view such events as the COVID pandemic as aberrations that people must vanquish so life can return to normal.

Ironically, efforts to control the world have rendered it increasingly unpredictable. Highly efficient systems – such as the supply chain or the international financial system – adapt poorly to small disruptions.

It can be comforting to accept what we truly are: a cosmic fluke, networked atoms infused with consciousness, drifting on a sea of uncertainty.Brian Klaas

Efforts at control can backfire, Klaas warns. For instance, when Mao Zedong led China, he sought to fight disease by recruiting citizens to kill rats, flies, mosquitos, and sparrows. Without sparrows to prey on locusts, their population exploded, culminating in a famine that killed millions of people.

Embrace random experimentation. Improvisation and continual trial and error are the best ways to approach a complex problem.

Complexity

Brian Klaas writes for The Atlantic and hosts the Power Corrupts podcast. He is at home with complex thought and with organizing and presenting the complex thoughts of others. As he writes about the inevitable interlocking of events in today’s world, Klaas seamlessly interlocks the concepts of various thinkers to underscore his thesis. In an era when philosophers seem ready to throw up their hands in surrender to AI, Klaas insists that humans are the font of insight. He commits to his mission early and sticks to it: people grappling with uncertainty must resist simple-minded notions of cause and effect and embrace the infinite variability of life. Klaas writes with ease and is always readable.