Chris Kempes
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Chris Kempes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I think that's incredibly fair. People often say complex adaptive systems to define complex systems or complexity. And so the adaptive part really matters to many people. Right. And so life is the quintessential adaptive system. And what we mean by that typically is that for an organism just to survive, just to persist, it has to deal with this constantly changing set of environments.
It has to respond to. all sorts of new predators, new cooperators, new ecologies. And to do that, it has to constantly mutate and evolve and adapt. And so that's one way to really define complexity, which is systems that have to continually find new solutions to an ever-changing world.
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, I think for me— I really focused on that hierarchy and internal structure and all the ways that organisms come to find solutions. To me, that's all a consequence of needing to adapt. So, you know, I like to say if there's one environment out there with only one limiting resource and it never changes.
You only need one very simple organism to survive in that. And in fact, it has no benefit in becoming more complex in gaining higher levels of structure and developing all these wonderful fractals on the inside like we do with our vascular systems. And so. if you have that really boring environment, you don't need adaptation. You just need to find one solution and stay there forever.
In fact, all mutations are bad. So any, and, and for us, some mutations are good. And so I think that's, you know, that, that is why I, I would sort of say you need that change. You need some external motivation to get, to get all the richness that we see in, in living organisms. Yeah.
Yeah, well, it's interesting, right? Because it's a blatantly obvious statement, as you're alluding to. And yet it's something we take for granted, right? So we're handed in the modern world this rich set of organisms, this vast diversity that we see in all these different ecosystems that we go into and amazing creatures that have toxins and
weird ways of moving around and all sorts of different intelligences. And so we look at that world and we sort of start to, and biology has classically started to try to tell stories about those organisms or explanations focused on the richness of their features. And I think we often forget this very simple fact, which is those organisms are situated in a physical environment.
They're situated in the laws of physics. They're situated in the laws of chemistry. And so a lot of what I do is to try and use the other end of the spectrum of thinking to say, if all we focused on was the fact that there are these physical laws that organisms live in, how much can we say about biology?
How much of all of that richness and amazing variation can we explain from just focusing on the laws of physics or laws of chemistry? Now, that's not every project. There are some places where you can't say very much about organisms from that perspective. But a lot of the game we play is to move into that space and say, how much can we explain from this simple perspective?
Exactly. And so I think, you know, you could say, well, imagine I'm in some sort of game theory situation with another organism where it's trying to eat me and I'm trying to build up these defenses. You know, so let's say I keep building this longer and longer spine on the outside of a very hard shell. And I do that so that it's harder and more painful for me to fit in something else's mouth.
This is the story of different phases of evolution in the history of life. Now, if I keep doing that, though, eventually I start to get a spine that is so long that the leverage on it means it's really easy to break. And so either I can't grow the spine any longer, or I have to make it much wider, or I have to use a different material to make that spine, right?
So this is a place where you'd say, well, the evolutionary dynamic is really about this predator prey evolutionary chase where one's trying to eat the other and the other's trying to build up defenses. But at some point, and probably at every point, those decisions run up against the laws of physics, right?
So to build a great defense, which you'd say defense is only in the context of a predator, but still to build up a great defense, I have to do so in a way that is also optimizing certain physical constraints. And that's the key. And so it's that every time I'm making an evolutionary consideration, I'm also making a physical one. And actually, Galileo was the first person to point this out.
as he did with sort of his drawings of bones and explaining how as organisms got bigger, their bones had to get much wider just so that it wouldn't break. And so I think this is something, again, we often take for granted.
Well, there is interesting quantum mechanics in systems like photosynthesis. I don't work so much on those. I'm mostly concerned with packages of biological stuff. So I sort of think, you know, the viruses are sort of as small as I get. So I don't go quite to the quantum mechanical scale. But yeah, you can use a lot of classical physics. to describe much of what we see in organisms.
Now, where that gets complicated is where those classical physics interface with complicated, say, mathematical geometries.
So a lot of the work that's been done at the Santa Fe Institute, Jeffrey West and Brian Inquist and Jim Brown did this work in the late 90s, was to show that when you start to think about optimizing even classical physical constraints, the best way to do that is with a fractal geometry. And so then the
the mathematics of that geometry become more complicated, but the constraints you're optimizing are still classical physics constraints.
Yeah, and so what I mean by physical constraint is really there's a physical law. And as you know well, physical laws often apply at certain length scales or certain amounts of mass or that sort of thing. But over some range of sizes, there are certain physical laws that are present. And those inform sort of how all the physics at that scale operates. And that's what I mean by constraint.
So gravity is really a law of physics. But we could think about that also as a constraint in the sense that if I get taller, I have to deal with different forces of braking that owe to gravitational forces on our planet. So it's really that sort of thing. Now, you can have more abstract constraints. some of which emerge in time. I mean, in over evolutionary time.
Showing 1–20 of 209 · page 1 of 11
Next →