Are We Ready for Complexity ?
Wheatley ( 2006 ) says :
Edward Lorenz , a meteorologist , first drew public attention to this with his now famous " butterfly effect ." Does the flap of a butterfly wing in Tokyo , Lorenz queried , affect a tornado in Texas ( or a thunderstorm in New York )? Though unfortunate for the future of accurate weather prediction , his answer was " yes ." ( p . 121 )
These excerpts , and almost all business explanations of the butterfly effect , transform it from a story of tiny actions compounding in unpredictable ways to a story of tiny actions having predictable , controllable impacts . I have taken to calling this second story the underbutterfly effect , because its hero is an underdog who changes the world . The underbutterfly simply refuses to fall in line with the millions of other butterflies ( not to mention innumerable more powerful creatures ) whose feeble flaps are lost in the sea of uncertainty in which we live .
Finding the exact place where the underbutterfly first opened its wings would be an arduous task , but my suspicion is that the second story arose almost immediately . Gleick ( 1987 ) describes an incident in which Lorenz explains the butterfly effect to a colleague .
" Prediction , nothing ," he said . " This is weather control ." His thought was that small modifications , well within human capacity , could cause desired largescale changes . Lorenz saw it differently . Yes , you could change the weather . You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done . But if you did , then you would never know what it would otherwise have done . It would be like giving an extra shuffle to an already well-shuffled pack of cards . You know it will change your luck , but you don ’ t know whether for better or worse . ( p . 21 )
Another curiosity is that even though Gleick illustrates the butterfly effect so well in his metaphor of sensors covering the earth , he also tells the underbutterfly story — seemingly without noticing it ( Gleick , 1987 ).
[ S ] ensitive dependence on initial conditions was not an altogether new notion . It had a place in folklore :
" For want of a nail , the shoe was lost ;
For want of a shoe , the horse was lost ;
For want of a horse , the rider was lost ;
For want of a rider , the battle was lost ;
For want of a battle , the kingdom was lost !" ( p . 23 )
Nowhere can I find this nursery rhyme used to convey the impossibility of knowing which of the millions of horseshoe nails ( not to mention innumerable more powerful objects ) might
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