1	Self-Organization: Nature’s Intelligent Design J. C. Sprott Department of Physics University of Wisconsin – Madison (USA) Presented for Wednesday Night @ the Lab in Madison, WI on July 10, 2013
2	Self-organized Structures in Nature
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4	Landscape of Early Southern Wisconsin (USA)
5	#2 Stochastic Cellular Automaton Model
6	Cellular Automaton (Voter Model)
7	Initial Conditions
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12	#3 Deterministic Cellular Automaton Model
13	Why a deterministic model? Randomness conceals our ignorance Simplicity can produce complexity Chaos requires determinism The rules provide insight
14	Deterministic CA
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17	Power Laws (Zipf)
18	Other Examples of Power Laws Populations of cities Size of moon craters Size of solar flares Size of computer files Casualties in wars Occurrence of personal names Number of papers scientists write Number of citations received Sales of books, music, … Individual wealth, personal income Many others …
19	#4 Lotka-Volterra Models
20	Minimal High-D Chaotic L-V Model
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22	Chaos Chaos is the unpredictable behavior of deterministic systems It is sensitive to initial conditions (the “butterfly effect”) It produces erratic fluctuations and never repeats Systems that produce fractal spatial patterns usually exhibit temporal chaos
23	#5 Social Network Model
24	Social Networks You tend to befriend friends of your friends You tend to mirror others’ friendliness toward you You have a limited capacity for maintaining friendships
25	#6 Strange Attractors
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28	Aesthetic Evaluation
29	Conclusions Many simple models exhibit self-organization (the spontaneous development of complex structures). Models with symmetric rules can have highly asymmetric behavior (symmetry breaking). Some effects may not have easily identifiable causes. The 2nd law of thermodynamics (increasing disorder) is not violated since these systems are far from equilibrium (driven by energy flow). If there is intelligent design in nature, it is at a more fundamental level (the underlying laws of nature) than its proponents commonly suppose.
30	References http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/ lectures/selforg.ppt (this talk) http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/ chaostsa/ (my book on Chaos) sprott@physics.wisc.edu (contact me)