Are We Ready for Complexity ?
of representation are equivalent apart from an inversion of the sign of the function . ( para . 1 )
However , “ an inversion in the sign of the function ,” when people are thinking about the function , is not equivalent . In a world of tiny people stuck to a giant ball , you cannot just flip the landscape and have it not matter . Height-value relationships are strong in human communication because they are strong in human experience ( Lakoff and Johnson , 2003 ):
Spatialization metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience ; they are not randomly assigned . A metaphor can serve as a vehicle for understanding a concept only by virtue of its experiential basis . ( p . 18 )
Consider the possibility that the flip in the adaptive landscape was not randomly assigned . Consider the possibility that it arose from a deep-seated yearning for certainty in the face of new revelations about complexity .
Murray Gell-Mann ( 1995 ) describes the flip thus :
Biologists conventionally represent fitness as increasing with increasing height , so that maxima of fitness correspond to the tops of hills and minima to the bottom of pits ; however , I shall use the reverse convention , which is customary in many other fields , and turn the whole picture upside-down . ( p . 249 )
When he says “ which is customary in many other fields ,” he is referring primarily to the free-energy landscape used in physics , where the X and Y dimensions describe characteristics of materials and the vertical axis describes the amount of energy available to do work . In this landscape , pits represent conditions of maximum entropy from which it is difficult to shift materials at rest . However , there is no clean mapping between evolution and entropy . For example : does mutation increase entropy ? In the short term , yes ; but in the long term , no , because it increases a population ’ s chance of surviving in a changing environment .
In the next paragraph , Gell- Mann admits the difficulty posed by the flipped landscape :
If the effect of evolution were always to move steadily downhill — always to improve fitness — then the genotype would be likely to get stuck at the bottom of a shallow depression and have no opportunity to reach the deep holes nearby that correspond to much greater fitness . At the very least , the genotype must be moving in a more complicated manner than just sliding downhill . ( p . 249 )
That is precisely the problem with flipping the adaptive landscape : things that were complex and uncertain become simple and certain .
Now let us examine a case from the literature on complexity in organi-
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