Notes
Outline
Self-organization:
Nature’s Intelligent Design
J. C. Sprott
Department of Physics
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Presented at the
UW Faculty Coterie
On December 14, 2004
Self-organized Structures in Nature
Slide 3
Landscape of Early Southern Wisconsin (USA)
#2
Stochastic Cellular Automaton Model
Cellular Automaton
(Voter Model)
Initial Conditions
Slide 8
Slide 9
#3
Deterministic Cellular Automaton Model
Why a deterministic model?
Randomness conceals our ignorance
Simplicity can produce complexity
Chaos requires determinism
The rules provide insight
Deterministic CA
Slide 13
Slide 14

Power Laws (Zipf)
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 citation received
Sales of books, music, …
Individual wealth, personal income
Many others …
#4
Lotka-Volterra Models
Multispecies Lotka-Volterra Model
Evolution to
“the Edge of Chaos”
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
Minimal High-D Chaotic L-V Model
Slide 22
#5
Social Network Model
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
#6
Strange Attractors
Slide 26
Slide 27
Aesthetic Evaluation
Conclusions
Many simple models exhibit self-organization (the spontaneous development of complex structures).
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.
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)