(This is Part 7 in a series. Go back to Part 6.)
Let's ask again: What is this "small-world quality"?
It has to do with the the average number of "steps" it takes to go from one node in the network to any other node in the network, called by scientists the diameter of the network. In a network like the brain, for example, with a hundred billion neurons, if each neuron were only wired to a few of its neighbors it could take tens of millions of steps for an event in one part of the brain to affect and coordinate with a distant part of the brain; the brain can't afford such laxity.
Life solved this problem by developing this "preferential attraction" quality, that is, the tendency for "the big to get bigger," the tendency for wealth to concentrate, the tendency for the most popular nodes in a network to grow even more popular—however we'd like to think of it.
As mentioned before, this serves a very useful purpose: It is these "popular" nodes, so widely connected, that serve to connect disparate parts of the network to each other, so that it only takes a few steps to get from one end of the network to the other. Think of the most popular airports or "hubs"—they tend to have the most connections to other areas of the country and the world. Thus the most "popular" nodes of a network help the network to stay connected closely together as one self-maintaining unit.
But there is also a downside to this "preferential attraction" quality of networks.
As certain nodes tend to get bigger and bigger, they tend to get "congested." Think of airport traffic moving in and out of a large airport, or traffic in large metropolitan areas. As the airport or city or whatever grows larger, its congestion problems increase. That is, its traffic links (communications links) encounter more and more congestion and delays.
This increasing "congestion" of the network as certain nodes get larger and larger has the effect of decreasing the efficiency of the network's communication and feedback cycles. Think of traffic stuck in rush hour. As such congestion increases, we could say that the "pollution" of the network is increasing.
This is easy to see in the eco-system, for instance. As the human population on the planet increases, there is increasing pollution/congestion of the planet's various eco-cycles and feedback loops, and the eco-system is showing serious signs of strain.
Another example is a human body that gets more "polluted" or "toxic." What does that mean?
Many diets in modern society are characterized by foods high in cooked fat and oil, as well as toxic salt, additives, pesticides and synthetic pseudo-foods. Such foods increase the overall toxic load that the body must carry, decreasing the efficiency of its countless self-regulating inter-locked cycles, as well as the efficiency of the networks inside each of the body's six trillion cells.
As toxins begin to overwhelm the body, what we call "cancer" or "tumors" begin to form. Since these tumors do not participate in the body's self-regulating systems—but do follow the law of preferential attraction—as the toxic congestion of a body increases its tumors also tend to increase in size and scope.
More generally, as the toxic pollution within which a network is functioning increases, the system's "tumors" also increase. It becomes more "lawless." That is, as a network becomes more toxic, congested and polluted, it begins to slowly fragment as a network.
We can see a further example of this in the various disruptions now beginning to occur more and more strongly in human society.
Our human society is on the verge of various disruptions or, as network theorists like to say, "perturbations." For instance, the worldwide credit (debt) bubble has grown beyond its natural limits and is beginning to break down. The overall toxic load of the planet's worldwide eco-system is increasing, and so forth.
We see the early symptoms of this economically in declining worldwide stock markets (which have much farther to go), in the collapse of economies from Argentina to Indonesia to Africa, in the torpid posture of the economies of Japan and Europe and the U.S., which will soon turn into a world-wide depression.
We also see the early symptoms of this phenomenon in the increasing polarization among groups. For instance, we see the rise of terrorism, the increasing tensions between various nations such as Israel and Palestine, or India and Pakistan, as well as the increasing polarization between the West and Islam.
The ecological networks are also beginning to break down, as fisheries are exhausted, forests disappear, CO2 concentrations and global warming increase, and so on. We could say that "tumors" of various kinds are appearing in the global human and ecological networks.
It's useful to remember that any self-organizing network, including the universe itself, has various fluctuations in the process of its continuing self-organization and self-maintenance. Some of these fluctuations our human mind labels as "negative" and some we label as "positive." Yet all are necessary. "Negative" or self-regulating feedback is just as essential to a self-organizing network—in fact more so—as "positive" or self-reinforcing feedback.
Thus all fluctuations in the system are ultimately serving the greater good. Another way of saying this is that
Reality is always self-organizing. What we label as "positive" and "negative" are all serving the ultimate self-organization and self-maintenance of the infinite network. All is necessary, all is part of the overall harmony.
Of course, this does not diminish at all the trauma of human pain and suffering as we begin, on an external level, a very large overall perturbation of our human and planetary networks.
Nevertheless, we can pose the question now: How can a polluted/congested system which is manifesting various symtoms of toxicity—such as the ecological networks of our planet, or a body that has cancer—begin to free itself from its toxic load?
(This is the end of Part 7. Go to Part 8.)
—jim sloman, 12.8.02 for 2.3.03
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