Heroes Not Zombies

I’m pretty sure this wee plant seeded itself on top of this metal plate but it looks as if the iron frame has been an attempt to fence the plant in.

But look! This plant isn’t going to be constrained so easily. It’s made it’s way out through a little gap and is already discovering a second exit.

Many years ago on my morning commute I sat next to a student on the train. The student was revising for a science exam and the definition of science which she was rehearsing really struck me at the time.

It had the following steps –

• Observation
• Description
• Explanation
• Prediction
• Control

So I was with this for the first three steps – observation, description and explanation. This is completely consistent with what I love about science. It’s about noticing, looking carefully, describing what you see and trying to explain it by way of trying to understand what you’re looking at. All of that fits with a science of wonder. A science which is humble and curious.

So the next two steps were the ones I found, and still find, controversial, and frankly a bit misguided – prediction and control.

Wow! Prediction! Good luck with that! Hasn’t this pandemic shown us how often our predictions are wrong? Hasn’t the emergence of more and more extreme weather events shown us how difficult it is to predict rainfall, floods, forest fires, hurricanes? Not to mention volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

The truth is prediction quickly becomes inaccurate the less focused and limited it is. The further ahead we look the less accurate our predictions. But more than this, all of Life, all of Nature, all individual human existence is a complex, open system. What happens in this real world cannot be reduced and abstracted without being falsified. All is interconnected and the webs of connections allow the open flow of particles, energy and information unceasingly. Prediction in detail over time isn’t possible.

That’s why the shift towards industrialised Medicine is so wrong. Nobody can predict the life path or future health of any individual with accuracy and nobody can be sure about the outcomes of treatments at an individual level either.

Which brings me to the last point – control.

We live in a society obsessed with power and control. We do not control NATURE. We do not control LIFE. It’s an illusion.

So it’s refreshing to see that complexity science is leading to a resurgence of a science of wonder and hopefully that shift will begin to let us put the control myth back in its box and replace it with a determination to care instead.