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Author
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Topic: Simplicity
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rolandt
Member
Member # 646
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posted 30. January 2003 21:16
Not holding a PhD. in anything, with training only in undergraduate Mathematics and Computer Science, please forgive my lack of knowledge in CID. But I sense that studying complexity in information and design in biologically engineered systems to provide evidence of a grand Designer is only half the problem. To me complexity is too close to randomness and chaos to provide clear evidence of a grand Designer. Of course the statistical probabilities involved, seem to me, to make it obvious of a Designer, but the refutations abound and I’m not qualified to address them.
Never the less, what I feel is missing from this argument or study is “simplicity”. My job currently is to reduce, as much as possible, the complexity of our computing enterprise in order to linear-ize our computing enterprise growth curve. This, while not reducing functionality, performance, and enterprise computing power. If we don’t get a handle on the exponential increase in complexity growth, our computing environment will negate itself and it will become impossible to make a profit (even with all the “wiz-bang” new applications we devise).
So you can see that “complexity” to me is the enemy. We have a saying at work that goes like this “Complexity is easy and weak, simplicity is hard and powerful”. It’s easy to design complex systems, they seem to self-perpetuate. They also seem to occur naturally. Just start with a simple idea, give it to a design engineer and you get a complex mess when it’s implemented (kinda like a kaleidoscope). What is extremely difficult is to start with a simple profound idea and keep it simple during implementation without loss of power. A tremendous amount of work is involved in revising and refactoring a design to insure simplicity and elegance is retained. If a design is done properly, then it should be in its simplest most elegant form. This to me is another indicator of a designer (a good one concerned with beauty and elegance) and that is evidence of simplicity that unifies complexity. Not that complexity does not exist within a good design, but effort was taken to hide it or abstract it away into a simple form. Now I’m not a molecular biologist and would not even know how to research something like this in a living organism, but could it be possible that evidence of simplicity, abstracting away complexity within an organism, could be another evidence of a grand Designer? Just some thoughts.
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Irving
Member
Member # 535
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posted 31. January 2003 09:02
Rolandt:
quote:
“Complexity is easy and weak, simplicity is hard and powerful”
Your observations may have some relevance to this thread: ID Predictions made by an Engineer
Some selected quotes that may show relevance:
From Kyle7:
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There is a significant difference in systems that are intelligently designed as a whole and systems where the design evolves over time with different requirements and specifications. The latter are less unified with duplicate systems and many "add ons" whereas the former are more efficient without duplication and unnecessary redundancy.
From RBH:
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Does producing those kinds of architectures in either human or biological systems require that elements have certain kinds of enabling properties, do their representations have to have certain kinds of properties, and/or do the assembly processes have to have certain properties in order to allow those kinds of architectures to occur?
From Janitor@MIT:
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But the expanded vocabulary of modern evolutionary biology, specifically the terms and concepts (global and less than precisely defined) of “adaptability” and “evolvability,” needs to be more closely examined for what exactly such terms are conveying. Terms like these may be unfamiliar to an engineer, but he is, no doubt, well acquainted with the ideas that they convey: provisioning for the possible, designing for the foreseeable!
Reusability/scalability has its limits. Gunther Wagner and Lee Altenberg (“Complex adaptations and the evolution of evolvability,” Evolution 50: pp. 967-976 (1996). Treating the subject at the next (third?) highest level in the hierarchy.) have theorized that continued evolution requires a relaxation in the level of system integration (pleiotropy).
Now, Irving has suggested, tentatively and innocently (but not naively) that scalability is problematic on conventional terms. But it may be that scalability is a definitive and universal systems level design principle for biology. If it’s a problem, it’s a big problem.
I appologize for the selected quotations. I've only included them for interest. Please review actual posts for appropriate context, I don't wish to mis-portray anyone's position!
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