Bees, infection, lean, and emergent immune systems

"What's good for the hive is good for the bees." That's one of the posters near the cafe at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore. I recall it's described as an "African saying."

I've gone on at great length looking for the right way to describe and convey the difference between multi-level organization and, well, "heaps."

There seems to be an extremely strong bias in the US against anything that has to do with higher organizational levels of humans - unless it's man-made, centrally-planned, top-down business organizations. Anything "bottom up" has a cultural repellent overtone of collectivism or labor-movements or community-organizers ( read "troublemakers") or socialism or communism or Star Trek's ultimate bogeyman - "The Borg."

It's puzzling. It's as if there's a conviction on the one hand that the country has passed through its entire need for "social and economic development" and is trying to forget that awkward, teenager stage when things didn't work out well, now that ... um ... we have everything perfectly under control?

That's pretty much a "theory X" model, where all the expertise is concentrated at the top, and the only thing everyone below that level is good for is blind obedient labor or paying taxes. And maybe that did work in the middle ages or for running plantations or companies where the labor was just an extension of the company's founder.

But, that model also ran out of steam a few decades ago, as more companies started being "knowledge based" with "knowledge workers," all of which meant that the center of mass of the expertise was moving from the executive wing to the shop floor. In hospitals, for example, there was a traumatic transition, that's still happening, where the main administrator of the hospital would now be a professional administrator, who was not even a medical doctor. The expertise in medical matters was shifting out to the floor, and the expertise in central administration was becoming, gasp, "administration" -- which previously had been sort of a dirty "four-letter word", the kind of thing that only worn out doctors would do when they couldn't keep up with "real work."

All this is morphing slowly, and with loud shrieks and moans and strenuous objections, towards "theory Y" where the laborers are assumed to be highly competent experts and in touch with reality on the floor or "ground truth" or "in country" or whatever the context is. Central "management's" role became less to "direct" or "manage" the operation than to "orchestrate" it. There' s no way the new "conductors" could even begin to grasp how to operate one of the "instruments" out there in the orchestra, let alone be the fount of all wisdom on every one of the sub-sub-sub-specialties and stay current on every relevant journal and attend every important conference.

So, it's a new "paradigm." The "chain of command" doesn't go away, but the nature of the command is distinguished very carefully from "information flow".

Now, if you look at this through the high-magnification lens, it doesn't look very different from the old model. (see picture below).


To see the difference, you need to rotate the microscope lenses around to a lower-power, broader field-of-view lens, and you can see what's changed, or what has to change, to make this new model work as advertised.

The big changes are that:

• News about the outside world comes in at the bottom (the front, the ground troops), and loops up to the top, where it has an effect, altering the new, revised orders that come back down the chain. That loop is travelled many times, but is still relatively slow.
• There is a very fast local loop, where feedback about performance comes right into the low level team, which responds to it on the spot, with no involvement of management. This is akin to your hand retracting from a hot stove without having to check in with the brain first. Or equivalent to the Coast Guard in Katrina, where they were pre-authorized to make decisions on their own without bothering headquarters.
• In Theory X, the news comes in the top, which has limited bandwidth or a small 1-person pipe, then only some of it goes down and some is lost at each level, depending on upper managers to recognize what lower employees care about. Finally a dribble of news makes it to the front. The troops report what they see and differences with what the orders seem to imply, but at each level going back up the chain, half of that is deleted by managers who think they know what the boss actually cares about. By the time the internal news gets up to the boss, 3 months later,
• it's unrecognizable.
• TheoryX is very hard to steer with. The Boss is effectively blind to what's going on inside, the troops are essentially blind to what the boss sees outside, and the whole thing feels like "pushing" on a rope.
• Theory Y is very easy to steer with. Most of the heavy lifting is done at each level with fast feedback that never has to go up to the brain and back down to the hand. Because the loop upwards is fast and phase-locked, news at the front actually makes it up to the top, which can change the mental model and the marching orders. The troops effectively control the boss, the same way the water-level controls the hand when filling a glass of water.
• Carrying on the "rope" analogy, it's like PULLING on a rope that goes out to a pulley and comes back to a pulley and goes in a big loop. You can accomplish "pushing" your clothes out to dry by "pulling" on the rope. The LOOP does the magic. You need the loop.

Well, I came in to talk about bees and emergent immune systems, and I've headed off in what seems a different direction, so now let's stop, turn around, and look a the "bee problem" from the top of this mountain we just climbed.

What's the problem? As the Los Angeles Times put it this morning,
Suddenly, the bees are simply vanishing.

by Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II
June 10, 2007

The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.

Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.

"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."

Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.

So far, they are stumped.

The problem seems to be both a parasite (that can be killed by irradiating the hive), and a simultaneous breakdown in the bee's immune systems. The article states:

Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.

"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.

The article goes on looking at parasites, but I want to hit the brakes here, get off the highway, and go up the side road of looking at the question of suppression of immune systems. This is pure speculation, but possibly important speculation.

What catches my attention here is that there is a natural, multi-level beastie here - and that is that honeybees don't exist as individuals, they exist as parts-of-a-hive. Increasingly research is showing that humans have lot of the same tendencies, but for bees this is extreme. If you remove a honeybee from its hive, I suspect it will simply die - as will a human cell if you remove it from a human body. (That's why it's so hard to cultivate human "cell-lines".)

The latest literature on humans shows that it's not just that a person's immune system reflects the "health" of their own body, but it also reflects whether the person has become isolated and fragmented from society. One of the most painful things for a person, that is sort of surprising in the "rational actor" model, is that the imprisonment in "solitary confinement" is extremely draining, even to prisoners. The need for daily interaction with other humans is tangible.

Chimps, if removed from their herd, have been shown to sacrifice a chance for food for a chance to open a window and see what the other chimps are doing. This is a deep, biological need, not confined to one species, or, as the human cell example shows, not confined to a single "level" of organizational hierarchy.

The point is this. If you forget what your eyes see, and look at what the mathematics show, human beings, or bees, or cells, are not the shape your eye sees. They have parts of their physiological control and regulatory systems that extend out into their larger social structure. Those are important parts, and if those parts are not well, or damaged, the damage is quickly manifested in the local physiology of the individual as well.

For tax or legal purposes, or buying a train ticket, we are separate "individuals". For purposes of computing how regulatory processes operate, and how they fail, we are not nearly so "separate". Because our eyes don't show us these invisible (but very real) connections, we tend to discount them, or ignore them. We do so at our peril.

These tendrils of our "meta-bodies" are like having our blood diverted from our bodies in tubes in a dialysis unit, run out to some other place, processed and cleaned up, and returned to our bodies through some other tube. We can say that is not "me", but in the sense that a breakdown in that system can directly cause you to be sick or die, it really is "you".

Apparently, cells, chimps, bees, humans, whatever, develop many such external loops in their interactions with each other. These can be so great that it is common to hear a person say that when a loved one abandons them or dies, "it is as if a part of me died."

Alternatively, it's been shown that cells with even damaged DNA's can be supported by a "field effect" from neighboring healthy cells, and not become cancerous. [ I'll track down the reference.] Notice that the "life sciences" spend a huge amount of effort on "signal transduction" and ways signals are communicated between cells, or between genes with "genetic circuits", but there's little use of a model that this low-level communication, if it persists, really has to be part of a high-level closed feedback control loops with a mind of its own, and the key thing to do is to find that loop. As I showed a few days ago, tracing out the loop is a challenge, because control information leaps happily from medium to medium, now in neurons, now in voice, now in electromagnetic waves, now in liquid flow, etc. The point is if you know there MUST be a closed loop, so that the cells can PULL on the ROPE (discussed above), then you are encouraged to find the rest of the pieces.

And, then, of course, if you're a drug company, you have a whole new set of intervention points at the meta-loop level.

In extreme cases, when the culture and society collapses, the impact can be dramatic. I suspect that collapse of cultural integrity is part of what is going on in the huge rise in suicide rates among native Americans right now. The history of the Pima Indians, in the USA, shows a dramatic collapse of physical and social health, going from a tribe with almost no diabetes and one with a reputation for being extremely cordial in 1800, to one with something like 80% diabetes rates and a high rate of suicide and interpersonal violence. Many factors are put forward to explain this, but I'm biased to looking at multi-level models for this kind of effect.

So, if something is killing off the honeybees, and the something is enabled by an apparent collapse of the individuals "immune systems", then other people will start looking at what's wrong with "this bee" (the "clinical medicine" model), and I'd prefer to start the investigation at the other end and ask "Is something wrong with the hive?"

In other words, what's "broken" for each bee may not be "inside the box" of that bee's "body", but may be out in the external part of the control-system-body that is connected into and through the "hive." In the analogy, the "dialysis machine" is broken, or the tubes running to it are clogged or kinked, or something like that.

I think this can be a very powerful model, to think that there are TWO life-forms involved that may need medical attention. One is a lot of individual cells, or bees, or people. The other is a much larger scale emergent thingie, that we'd call "our body", or "the hive" or "society" respectively.

To date, we've considered emergent thingies as if they would evaporate if you took away the tiny things that make up the big thingie.

But I've presented many cases where the emergent thingie suddenly transitions, becomes self aware, and takes on "a life of its own" and even acts as if it has "a mind of its own."

For humans, the emergent thingie is very familiar - it's "us". Cells may have formed the substrate in which our spirit was formed (or placed, if you prefer that model), but now that spirit has definitely taken on a life and identity and mind of its own that is only remotely related to the lives of the cells that once made it up, but now are subordinate to it.

We see the same pattern in many other places. Mental images in human or machine vision start by being made up of many small patches of data or patterns, but once they combine into an overall "vision" or "percept", that thingie takes on a life of its own and even if we remove the source data it persists. In fact, even if the data now refute it, it can continue to persist, and defend itself, and change what we look at in order to sustain itself. Wow.

So, I think it is safe to say that everyone recognizes that bees have a very strong social component to their daily activity and identity. And, like corporations that continue to exist long after the founders have died or left, "hives" tend to persist even if individual bees die off.

But, OK, say the hive is a living thing that has a "meta-body" and has something that is appropriately called "health" that is a mostly-independent factor from the health of the individuals within it. I say "mostly" because it's only in the short term that they may appear to be separate -- in the long term, they are tightly coupled because feedback loops have compounded the "weak interactions" and "loose coupling" into dominant factors.

So, if the bees are dying, it may be because the hive-scale-thingie is dying first. As with any feedback loop, causal "directions" become a meaningless concept. The hive and the individuals rise or fall as one, in a upward or downward spiral feedback loop pattern.

But, it still can make sense for humans to talk about "psychological problems" or "immune system problems" that are defined at the large-scale, meta-body level and may not even make sense at the individual cell level.

The point is, things can "break" or "be wrong" at that large scale.

That's why I keep on flashing that M.C. Esher picture of the waterfall -- everything is healthy locally, but it's broken globally. The two are completely distinct, in the short run. (but coupled in the long run in any living thing.)

Is this what's going on with the bees? I have no idea. But I am pretty certain that very few people who aren't systems analysts would even start with that approach and look there for signs of something wrong at that level. So, it would be "baffling."

This is exactly what many social and corporate organizational problems are. At a local level, we see the equivalent of "bees dying" or "employees burning out" or "employees quitting" and we are baffled as to what's wrong with them. Sometimes, the problem isn't at that level. Sometimes it's a structural problem, a "systems" problem. Those are hard to see to begin with, and impossible to see if you don't look for them on purpose and methodically.

A great deal of management literature these days, including The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker, describe problems and solutions at the meta-level, without ever springing, in my mind, to the overall pattern they are pointing to. This is an emergent-organism that has a meta-body. It acts like its alive, and it can have disorders and dysfunctions and "health" and often needs "medical attention" at its own scale. (But save us from most "consultants"!)

If you look at all the emphasis on "vision" or "spirit" or "direction" or "identity" in the management literature, you can simplify it all to an effort to create a self-aware, self-sustaining, emergent beastie at the meta-level -- a beastie that will then turn around and form a nurturing context and reshape and empower the people that just gave it life.

So, it's one thing if you push up emergent life, and when you let go it falls down again. That's one case. In this other case, it's more like a radio antenna or something -- you push up emergent life and push so hard or well that the life breaks loose and is radiated out and takes on an existence of its own outside the antenna. Then, you can shut down the transmitter or dismantle the antenna, and the radiated wave just keeps on propagating outward.

Except in this case, it's more like a ring-vortex wave that just sits in place, like a little donut-shaped "halo" above us. It doesn't shoot off a the speed of light, but instead turns around and comes back and embraces the parts that just created it.

I think this is what we're trying to do with corporate management these days, effectively.
I think that's what "lean" and "six-sigma" and "Toyota Production System" are about. They're about creating a culture that is vital, and self-sustaining and that reaches around people and becomes the sea they swim in and draw life from, while they complete the cycle and return the favor.

That requires a lot of complete loops to work, and they have to be vertically oriented. We need to have the vertical donut model, not the open-ended "tree" model of management to bring all the pieces into "phase-lock" and allow a laser-beam output, not incoherent light.

And, when it breaks, we need "doctors" of the corporate spirit to bring it into alignment with a pattern that works again.

But it's not "the Borg" and it's not scary and it's not homogenization and it's not domination and it's not an abandonment of a social hierarchy -- but it is a different use of those pathways, a transforming use, that uses vertical close-paths to make the top the bottom and bring vertical unity to the compound-level beast. Then, it works. Then, it's great!

Note: All closed paths are "loops", so any causal loop diagram will have lots of "loops".

Most of those loops aren't dominant. What will be dominant will be the FEEDBACK CONTROL LOOPS. These will be self-aware, self-repairing, persistent, goal-seeking loops. THOSE are the key players over any long period of time in living systems. Those are where things break, or never got formed in the first place. And those are the intervention points for a sustainable intervention.

Unity in diversity - the universal problem

If we're going to have a useful discussion on solving our most important common problems, we need to understand the concept of "unity in diversity" at more than a basic level.

I want to stress two features of this design problem of "unity in diversity" as I'm using that term:

• The design problem is very wide-spread. There are instances everywhere in space, time, and scale.
• The processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

First - the problem is very wide spread, across space, time, and scale.

• Our bodies have muscle tissue, nerve tissue, bone, blood, etc. - each with different jobs to do.
• Companies may have marketing, engineering, and manufacturing departments, each with different orientations and vocabularies.
• Families may have very young, young, middle-age, older, and very old members, each with very different interests and needs and vocabularies.
• A university may have different departments - such as "engineering" and "literature" and "athletics", with very different orientations, priorities, needs, and vocabularies.
• A hospital may have departments, specialties, and sub-specialties - such as medicine versus surgery, emergency medicine, emergency pediatric medicine, emergency pediatric respiratory medicine, etc. -- each with different interests, needs, orientations, and vocabularies.
• Our cells, internally, are not uniform but have specialized subsections for energy production, protein production, effectively library services (DNA), etc. These are all specialized with different structures, orientations, and functions.
• Our planet is not uniform but is divided, somewhat contentiously and fluidly, into "nations" which don't line up exactly with "cultures" or "continents." These may very specifically speak different languages and have different values, needs, and aspirations.
• There are often "classes" of society with differnt values, needs, and use of language, even if it appears at first glance to be "the same language."
• There is, literally, "no end to this." If we look upwards and outwards, it seems that the visible universe is divided into solar-systems surrounding stars, and the stars are clumped in to galaxies, and the galaxies are clumped into clusers.
• If we look at the internet and the world of weblogs and interest groups (the "blogosphere") researchers have found that it too has differentiated and clumped into subgroups that mostly talk within themselves, not across groups. (See Lada Adamic's work.)
• If we look at a high-school cafeteria, sometimes the breakup into groups, cliques, etc. is obvious.
• If we look at our cities, there are "neighborhoods" with local flavors that may be very different from each other.
• Our very concepts of life and knowledge have somewhat dynamic boundaries put into them breaking one world into different "fields of knowledge" with specialized vocabularies and interests and persistent identities.
  

This tendency to break apart a homogeneous population and turn it into specialized sub-groups is everywhere. This is a very basic physical process that always tends to happen.

If you don't believe me, ask any Dean, Director, parent, school-principal, general manager, mayor, governor, president or king. As soon as you get a large group of people together they tend to break apart into "warring factions." over the smallest things. And these people will also confirm that this problem is not just wide-spread and one that absorbs a lot of their time and attention, but is one that has a dramatic, often fatal impact on the survival of the collective enterprise - from productivity to creativity to agility. Everything gets wrecked by this breaking up into silos. So, yes, there is a lot of interest in ways to counteract that tendency, and in design patterns that are "reusable" and can be plugged into your own problem situation.

What's not yet shared, however, is the realization that these problems don't just span space, but they span scale and time. These are all, mathematically, the same problem - and it is the central problem everyone on earth has a vested interest in getting solved right now, if just to "fix" their own little corner that has gone wrong and spends more time fighting itself than it does getting useful chores done.

Without destroying the benefits of specialization, and without homogenizing everyone into "the Borg", how do we overlay something else additional on top of those specialties so that they all also have a common identity, a shared component, and can, when we need to, act as one? That's the engineering design question. What works? What has ever worked?

Second, the processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

The good news, then, is that anything we can learn about this process in one "field", say sociology, is immediately helpful in understanding another "field", such as "developmental biology", if (and only if) we can distinguish the universal aspects from the accidental local implementation details.

The physical laws and principles behind this tendency to break up into self-sustaining clusters come to us from "control system engineering", not physics or chemistry.

There are only a few stable and simple ways to make a self-sustaining control loop, with certain parts we will always find. More on this tomorrow. We know this can work because we're sitting here reading this, and our bodies are made of trillions of cells that are differentiated and yet integrated. There is a solution to this design problem. We need to understand it better.

If every level and instance of this problem has its own low-resolution sense and view and picture of this problem, limited by the very small size of their receiver, mathematically, we can still assemble all of those low-resolution pictures and process them using "image processing" techniques to come up with a single, high-resolution image of the design issue. That's where I'm going with this, phrased as an "image processing" problem. There are very powerful muscles to do that, if we can rotate this problem around and get it over to those muscles.
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Looking ahead , in the next few days I'll bring this back to the question of "immune systems" and the defenders of the faith, or at least, defenders of certain specialized substructures that life has rearranged itself into. There are some fascinating problems caused by the difference in scale between "members" and "the whole."

For example, in our own bodies, to function, we want our cells to be specialized into very specific functions and grouped into tissues and organs, and we want blood cells to be good blood cells, not sloppy blood cells. There are standards! Deviations must be rooted out!

But we also don't want "bone" cells to attack "blood cells" as if they were foreign invaders and enemies.

Now, this is a challenging problem, because we love our cells but, like loved birds like parakeets, they are still, well, to put it crudely, bird brains. PhD's have trouble understanding differences between cells - how are single-celled cells supposed to make a better job of it? (And, the astounding reality is that they do!)

Something really, really important is going on here. Somehow, a collection of dim-witted cells (relatively speaking) has managed, between them, to be collectively bright. This may be something some of us could use. How do they do that! Can we use the same principle to become collectively bright?

It's as if they don't have a brain cell between them. Actually, that's because they don't. They're too small to have "a brain". So, huh. How do we craft a design so that low-IQ cells, making only local observations, will correctly tell "good guys" from "bad guys" quickly and reliably - when the concept "good" and "bad" are actually not even meaningful at that level, but are concepts from a higher level of existence, at the organism level?

This kind of cross-level exchange of wisdom, and the relationship between the police of the immune system and the "immune system as a whole" is where we need to go to understand how things work, and therefore, how it can break, and therefore, if we have a broken one, how to fix it.