Network Theory: A Key to Unraveling How Nature Works
Carl Zimmer, yale 360
Ecologists who want to save the world’s biodiversity could learn a lot from Kevin Bacon.
One evening in 1994, three college students in Pennsylvania were watching Bacon in the eminently forgettable basketball movie The Air Up There. They started thinking about all the movies Bacon had starred in, and all the actors he had worked with, and all the actors those actors had worked with. The students came up with a game they called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, counting the steps from Bacon to any actor in Hollywood. In general, it takes remarkably few steps to reach him. Even Charlie Chaplin, who made most of his movies decades before Bacon was born, was only three steps away. (Chaplin starred with Barry Norton in Monsieur Verdoux, Norton starred with Robert Wagner in What Price Glory, and Wagner and Bacon worked together in Wild Things.)
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon became a 1990s sensation, complete with talk show appearances and a book deal. University of Virginia computer scientists got on the bandwagon as well, building a web site called The Oracle of Bacon. You can use it to analyze the connections between all 1.6 million actors listed in the Internet Movie Database. It reveals that all actors in Hollywood are connected to Bacon on average by just 2.95 steps.
But it turns out that Bacon is not so remarkable. Over 1,000 actors are linked to the rest of Hollywood by less then three links. And even the most obscure actors can be linked to everyone else in Hollywood by less than ten steps. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon says less about Bacon, in other words, than it does about the organization of the Hollywood network. If you were to simply join 1.6 million actors to each other at random, it would take many more links to connect any two of them than in real life.
Mathematicians call this intimate linkage a “small-world network.” And physicist Albert-Laso Barabasi of the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues have discovered that Hollywood actors are not unique in Scientists hope to use network theory to help them prevent the collapse of ecosystems. forming a small-world network. The World Wide Web is organized in the same way. So is the anatomy of the human brain. What’s more, all these networks get their small-world organization because they follow similar rules. In each network, most nodes are linked to only a few other nodes. But a small fraction of nodes have lots of links. These hubs shorten the paths between all the nodes in the entire network.
…Their studies have shed new light on the biggest debates in ecology. Most plants, for example, depend on animals of one sort or another to spread their pollen. In some cases, scientists have discovered exquisitely co-evolved partners that specialize only on one another. For example, some flowers keep their nectar in deep recesses that can only be reached by flies with tongues stretching several inches in length. Other pollinators are far less picky, browsing many different species, and there are also flowers that don’t rely on a single species of pollinator.
Ecologists have argued over which kind of partnership — specialized or generalized — is most important in ecosystems. The answer has important practical significance. If many plant species each depend on just one pollinator, then they are exquisitely vulnerable to extinction if they lose their partner.
Jordia Bascompte, an ecologist at the Spanish Research Council, and his colleagues have traveled to a number of ecosystems to catalog the plants animal pollinators visit and which animals visit each plant. The picture is much the same from one ecosystem to another. But that picture doesn’t match the simple extremes in the pollination debate…
(25 Jan 2010)
How to Get Our Democracy Back
Lawrence Lessig, The Nation
We should remember what it felt like one year ago, as the ability to recall it emotionally will pass and it is an emotional memory as much as anything else. It was a moment rare in a democracy’s history. The feeling was palpable–to supporters and opponents alike–that something important had happened. America had elected, the young candidate promised, a transformational president. And wrapped in a campaign that had produced the biggest influx of new voters and small-dollar contributions in a generation, the claim seemed credible, almost intoxicating, and just in time.
Yet a year into the presidency of Barack Obama, it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed. Not because it is too conservative. Not because it is too liberal. But because it is too conventional. Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign–a campaign that promised to “challenge the broken system in Washington” and to “fundamentally change the way Washington works.” Indeed, “fundamental change” is no longer even a hint.
Instead, we are now seeing the consequences of a decision made at the most vulnerable point of Obama’s campaign–just when it seemed that he might really have beaten the party’s presumed nominee. For at that moment, Obama handed the architecture of his new administration over to a team that thought what America needed most was another Bill Clinton. A team chosen by the brother of one of DC’s most powerful lobbyists, and a White House headed by the quintessential DC politician. A team that could envision nothing more than the ordinary politics of Washington–the kind of politics Obama had called “small.” A team whose imagination–politically–is tiny.
…This administration has not “taken up that fight.” Instead, it has stepped down from the high ground the president occupied on January 20, 2009, and played a political game no different from the one George W. Bush played, or Bill Clinton before him. Obama has accepted the power of the “defenders of the status quo” and simply negotiated with them. “Audacity” fits nothing on the list of last year’s activity, save the suggestion that this is the administration the candidate had promised.
Maybe this was his plan all along. It was not what he said. And by ignoring what he promised, and by doing what he attacked (“too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in”), Obama will leave the presidency, whether in 2013 or 2017, with Washington essentially intact and the movement he inspired betrayed.
That movement needs new leadership. On the right (the tea party) and the left (MoveOn and Bold Progressives), there is an unstoppable recognition that our government has failed. But both sides need to understand the source of its failure if either or, better, both together, are to respond.
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, Americans’ faith in the Supreme Court remains extraordinarily high–76 percent have a fair or great deal of “trust and confidence” in the Court. Their faith in the presidency is also high–61 percent…
(3 Feb 2009)
EB contributor Jan Lundberg writes:
While there’s much truth in Lawrence Lessig’s article, what he leaves out is the controlling part of the big-picture equation. He does not understand petroleum or how it will fail us and cause petrocollapse. Without petroleum in unlimited supply for food production, distribution, preservation and preparation, what do you think will result when there is a major oil crunch or crop failures, and food riots hit?
This can be triggered by a significant shortage in this age of peak oil, most likely from a geopolitical event. What will happen to businesses and the work force if commuting and trucking are stopped from lack of fuel for more than a couple of days? These questions are kept out of both corporate news media and the progressive press. Likewise, preparations for a transformation to a more localized, sustainable lifestyle are suppressed or occasionally given green lip service. It’s as if the Obamas’ organic White House food garden constituted a change in the way people were fed and treated the land.
The other blind spot in Lessig’s limited political analysis is that he fails to see what the dominant culture’s role is in North Americans’ behavior. The scum rises to the top, so the aspiring and current members of Congress will take money any way they can to serve their corporate masters or other funders. It’s not just a small class of greedy people ruining a country but rather a materialistic culture that believes in private gain and property over the needs of the community. Nature is something to milk until she’s dry. So now we reap the whirlwind of climate change, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion and food security.
As long as people think they can shop for what they need, and give their time and labor over to a boss or corporation, they will just be following the Wall Street elite and its Congressional friends down the slippery slope of petrocollapse and climate extinction.
A symptom of a greater problem should not command all our attention. An example is the problem with Priuses. Please enjoy the cartoon on our recent story “Stuck Accelerators: Toyotas and the Fossil-Fuel Growth Economy.”
Was “our democracy” ever ours? Exactly where does Lessig want us to get back to?
Globalization Is Killing The Globe: Return to Local Economies
Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams.org
Globalization is killing Europe, just as it’s already wiped out much of the American middle class.
Spain and Greece are facing immediate crises that many other European nations see on the near horizon: aging boomer workers are retiring with healthy benefit packages, but the younger workers who are paying for those benefits aren’t making anything close to the income (or, therefore, paying the taxes) that their parents did.
Globalists/corporatists/conservative “free market” and “flat earth” advocates say this is a great opportunity to cut benefits for the old folks (and for the young folks in the future), thus bringing the countries budgets back into balance, and this story is the main corporate media storyline.
But it overlooks the real issue (and the real solution): how globalization is killing these nations’ economies and what can be done about it.
… To use the United States as an example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s manufacturing accounted for a high of 28 percent of our total gross domestic product (and much of the rest of the economy like agriculture that, in a classical sense is “manufacturing” wasn’t even included in those numbers), and when Reagan came into office it was at a strong 20 percent. Today it’s about ten percent of our GDP.
What this means is that we’re creating less wealth here, because we’re not making much anymore. (And the biggest growth in American manufacturing has been in the military sector, where goods are made that are then destroyed when they explode over foreign cities, causing even more of our wealth to vanish.)
The main effect of the globalism fad of the past 30 yearrs — lowering the protective barriers to trade that countries for centuries have used to make sure their own local economies are self-sufficient — has been to ship manufacturing (the creation of wealth) from developed nations to developing nations. Transnational corporations love this, because in countries with lower labor costs and few environmental and safety regulations, it’s more profitable to manufacture products. They then sell those products in the “mature” countries — the places that used to manufacture — and people burn through the wealth they’d accumulated in the earlier manufacturing days (home equity, principally, along with savings and lines of credit) to buy these foreign-manufactured goods.
At first, it looks like a good deal to consumers in developed nations. Goods are cheaper! But over a decade or two or three, as the creation of real wealth is reduced and the residue of the old wealth is spent, the developed nations become progressively poorer and poorer. At the same time, the “developing” nations become wealthier — because those are the places that are producing real wealth.
(8 February 2010)
Thom Hartmann’s latest book is Threshold, The Crisis of Western Culture. -KS
