22. Emergence and Complexity

(May 21, 2010) Professor Robert Sapolsky gives a lecture on emergence and complexity. He details how a small difference at one place in nature can have a huge effect on a system as time goes on. He calls this idea fractal magnification and applies it to many different systems that exist throughout nature.


Stanford University:
http://www.stanford.edu/

Stanford Department of Biology:
http://biology.stanford.edu/

Stanford University Channel on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/stanford

Category:

Education

Tags:

• biology
• human
• fractals
• butterfly effect history
• thought
• body
• science
• logic
• comparison
• components
• breaking down
• piece
• part
• starting state
• complex system
• nature
• generation
• surface area
• emergence

[sciencepie]

Pan to the overheads when he shows them, cameraman! He's not talking about the different converging possible outcomes of his beard growth. D:

Otherwise, great lecture, probably the most mind-blowing/enlightening and novel lecture I've seen in this series yet. :D

[MarkoKraguljac]

Great lecture. Perfect program to play and experiment around these topics is NetLogo by Uri Wilensky. Emergence exploration at its best. Program is a product of academia and a free one. Its chock full of examples and most user friendly one I could find.

[jwrosenbury]

@hellomate639 I guess it's not really humor if you have to explain it.

[hellomate639]

@jwrosenbury

Most of them are.

Being an intelligent, unbiased, open minded creationist is virtually impossible.

[jwrosenbury]

@hellomate639 At least you didn't accuse them of being close minded.

[hellomate639]

@jwrosenbury

In the case of creationists, I think that they're mostly idiots or very deluded by either a long upbringing in Christianity, a mental weakness to believing in complete bullshit, or a lack of exposure to anything else.

I don't really care about giving an idea like creationism any credence whatsoever. I don't consider creationists "intellectual opponents" anymore than I consider a child who believes in Santa Claus an intellectual opponent.

Creationism is a mind disease.

[jwrosenbury]

@hellomate639 Why would they do that? Do you really think your intellectual opponents are idiots?

Most creationists expect a complicated world. While most have IQs less than 140, so do most Darwinists.

[hellomate639]

Imagine the creationist reaction to this. At first they'll not know what the Hell is going on. Then they'll realize that it's related to evolution and will reject it and claim to have understood everything that he said.

[dreznik]

Dear Robert -- one correction regarding the virtual ants' pheromones: thicker trails between closer nodes are not due to the finiteness of fluid to be spent; rather imagine pheromones are secreted at constant rate, and that the ants walk at a constant speed, so longer edges are traversed in more time, leading to more evaporation. this is what statistically promotes the shorter paths -- the fact that they are likely to last as markers for longer... I loved your lecture, congrats!

[ScorpiaX]

Anyone see a power law relationship with this playlist for behavioral biology? Hehe.

[ScorpiaX]

This man..perfect example (duolinguo).. wisdom of crowd..

Seriously, I could listen to this prof all day..

[chromosome24]

this camera man is killing me