Brunelleschi or other architects of the renaissance did not set out to design spandrels, those curved triangular areas between the arches supporting cupolas. Even if later on spandrels turned out to have their own utility, they appeared initially only as byproducts of adaptations. The same happens in evolution: not everything adaptive today appeared because it was adaptive. Gould and Lewontin called such accidental byproducts of adaptations — exaptations.

When stuck in a suboptimal peak of an adaptive landscape — whether in business or any other field — look to potential spandrels lurking in your enterprise for help in ratcheting up to the next peak.

Psychology, mass media research, and even behavioral economics have of late become very interested in the phenomenon called priming or framing: the fact that being exposed first to one stimulus biases one’s response to a second stimulus.
Priming and framing prevent us from discovering and consciously exploiting the current utility of byproducts of previous adaptations.
In other words, priming and framing blind us to the potential exaptations all around us.

Under the classical, mechanstic paradigm, identities were delimited by crisp, sharp edges — crisply defined conceptual boundaries, if you will. But the contextual embeddedness of complex systems makes them more like bramble bushes than geometrical shapes. Even worse, boundary conditions actually structure and organize complexity — just like the Aristotelian formal causes of old. The boundaries of a complex system are like a cell’s organic membranes, like the eardrum, permeable active site without which complex organization would not take place.
In light of this dynamic, where does an “ear” end and a “not ear” begin? How are we to understand the concept of “identity” given complex boundaries and their dynamics?

Today’s front page of the Wall St Journal has a hilarious article on the serious debate in France concerning whether or not “informatique en nuage” is an appropriate rendering of “cloud computing.”
Both France and Spain have official commissions that rule on the appropriateness of neologisms and terminology (France’s General Commission of Terminology & Neology and Spain’s Real Academia de la Lengua Espanola). You guys don’t get it, do you? Languages are living, dynamic, evolving developing — that is, complex — systems, not mummies pickled in history to be displayed in museums.
Purists — including those who scoff about fusion food — are fighting a losing battle: the future belongs to the melting pot!
Viva Spanglish!

I guess Nobels also go for hope. I guess, too, that just as there are sins of omission there are also prizes for omission, for not being…
I’m a big Obama fan, but…
Started Socialnomics but quit after the third page when I read “principals” instead of “principles.”
I’ve always tolerated “fast but sloppy” (evolution selects for that; “slow and meticulous” gets eaten!), but in a book? Where’s the editor?

Are the following incompatible?
1. Manufacturers and their sales force want the very “design of everyday things” to point to the way a product is to be used (Norman); consumers feel comfortable when they can slot a product into a familiar category.
2. Industries thrive on innovation, and radical innovation is a matter of “redomaining” (Brian Arthur), connecting a principle from one domain with a purpose from another.
4. People classify the same item into different categories depending on their experiences, the cues (priming) they encounter prior to classification… but
3. People also confabulate wildly to arrange contradictory, paradoxical, or just plain unfamiliar sensations into a coherent picture (Gazzaniga).

I love October. Tis the season of Nobel, MacArthur, and Booker awards — celebrations of true accomplishments not celebrity. And this is the time of early, glorious Fall weather in Washington, D.C. I didn’t even lose my cool at standing in line for over 95 minutes at various branches of the US Post Office without getting what I needed done done. This brand is toast.

Over the next few blogs I want to mull over the topic of innovation: particularly how to spot or anticipate the next innovation. Fundamentally, however, it’s a question of how we classify and sort things, and therefore how we can detect (perceive, classify, spot, much less anticipate) radical novelty.

I just learned that the very concept of blackmail didn’t really exist prior to the 19th century. Before the rise of “professional classes” whose economic and social status depended on their reputation, the whole idea of blackmail was by and large logically impossible: nobles remained members of the nobility — with all the rights and appurtenances pertaining thereto”! — regardless of their behavior.
But what about members of the clergy?
And today… being blackmailed and exposing the threat apparently amounts to a brilliant career move!
Is the related notion of privacy a similarly short-lived virtue? It began in the 17th century — with the rise of the Dutch bourgeoisie. But do any teenagers you know really care about privacy?

Or is it just Cuban complexity?

I’m currently consumed with getting the word out about Complejidad 2010, the 5th biennial conference on the Philosophical Applications of Complexity Theory, which will be held next January 6-8 in Havana, Cuba.

Doyne Farmer will deliver the opening talk, Niles Eldredge the closing address. Daniel Brooks, John Collier, Alvaro Moreno, and Steve Wallis, among others, will present papers. Bob Ulanowicz, Carl Rubino, and I will be conducting a pre-conference workshop on Complexity, Self-Organization, and Awe.

The conference will be followed (Jan 9-10) by a workshop on redfish.com’s NetLogo software.

There are approximately 600 scholars working in this field throughout the island, with applications from epidemiology, to linguistics, to organizational theory.

Is it applied complexity… or an example of complexity in action?

Check out what we’ve accomplished in 10 years at here