Day 114: Complex Adaptive Systems

You're probably looking at that title thinking, 'this is too weird for a literary blog, I'm unsubscribing' but wait! I promise the word soup above does have a real meaning and it does apply to writing good stories, at least in my opinion. I think it applies in a way that many of us have experienced, but maybe haven't been able to fully understand. If you've written a character piece before, or really any plot, you'll probably have had your characters do something unexpected at some point. It's like they take on a mind of their own. Sometimes it's a brief moment, or sometimes they do whatever they please for the rest of the story, but either way it feels unreal. If you're like me, you probably thought about how weird this is. If everything I've created is coming from my brain, then how can anything unexpected happen? How can I plot everything out and know how all the characters think, where all the characters start, and even where all the characters end, but be unable to predict their actions beforehand? Is it even possible to do that?

Well the short answer is no. And I think the reason for that lies in the nature of complex adaptive systems. So what is that exactly? I think a story that's been told many times before will make it quite obvious what I mean by that, so here goes.

In 1995, grey wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. They had to be reintroduced because people thought it was a grand idea to wipe all of them out to make the park safer for humans, and so they wouldn't eat so many of the valuable animals we used to hunt for pelts and meat. That went poorly, to say the least. Deer took over the park after the wolves were hunted to a population of zero, and when the deer took over, the natural order was destroyed. Saplings that grow near riverbanks couldn't grow to their natural size because the deer would eat them alive, berries in the area disappeared because the deer ate all of them, and without trees and berries, the songbirds left the area. With nothing to leave elk and deer corpses behind, and all the berries eaten up, the bears' food supply was harmed too, and their population fell as well. River banks, weakened by the damaged root structures of the smaller and less numerous trees, crumbled under the force of the water that flowed through them. This all occurred over the course of about 100 years. After just 14 wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, these processes all reversed. The wolves scared the deer away from the river banks, meaning the trees could come back in force, and the berries too. Songbirds returned, and bears did too. The biggest impact was the changing course of the rivers, strengthened by the trees that grew up to five times their reduced size in just six years. All this caused by 14 wolves.

This system is known to be complex because just knowing all the inputs doesn't guarantee knowledge of all the outputs. In fact, just slight changes in the starting conditions of this type of system can create massive changes in the ultimate outcome. Who could have predicted before hand that the course of rivers would change because of 14 wolves? It is adaptive because it changes over time based on the interactions between the individual parts. Wolves hunt and scare deer away from the bare banks, which allows the trees to grow back, which strengthens the river banks and gives cover for animals, which brings back songbirds and bears and suddenly everything's different.

There are many such systems in the world, but once upon a time we didn't think they could exist. Prior to the 19th century, the prevailing opinion about the universe was that all knowledge was attainable. People thought that knowing all the inputs of any given system, the economy, the weather, the environment, would give ultimate knowledge of everything that could happen in the system. It was only a matter of time until we knew literally everything. We realized this wasn't true in a few different fields, but the one that really synched it was the weather. Billions have been invested into predicting the weather over the decades, but we can't really do it. More than 10 days out, weather predictions are only correct about 50% of the time. These systems have hidden information that's only revealed over the course of time by letting the parts interact, much in the same way that characters have to interact for a long time before we can we really see how they'll get to know each other. The systems inside our brain are complex and adaptive, and just knowing how all the pieces work at the start, or where all the pieces will eventually end up, doesn't really tell you the whole story. Otherwise, I think we probably wouldn't even feel the need to write them in the first place.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley

Wolves of Yellowstone