The power of delusion -- genetic causality

What was reported as a dramatic event came this week, if we are to believe, in the official recognition of the fact that human genes co-operate as complex systems, not as some sort of "one gene, one function" machine tools.

Here's the heart of the New York Times article today (7/2/07) by Denis Caruso, identified
as follows: "Denise Caruso is executive director of the Hybrid Vigor Institute, which studies collaborative problem-solving. E-mail: dcaruso@nytimes.com."
A Challenge to Gene Theory, a tougher Look at Biotech

The $73.5 billion global biotech business may soon have to grapple with a discovery that calls into question the scientific principles on which it was founded.

Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of how genes function. The exhaustive four-year effort was organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world. To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a “tidy collection of independent genes” after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists “to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.”

[T]he report is likely to have repercussions far beyond the laboratory. The presumption that genes operate independently has been institutionalized since 1976, when the first biotech company was founded. In fact, it is the economic and regulatory foundation on which the entire biotechnology industry is built.

But when it comes to innovations in food and medicine, belief can be dangerous.

Overprescribing antibiotics for virtually every ailment has given rise to “superbugs” that are now virtually unkillable.

The principle that gave rise to the biotech industry promised benefits that were equally compelling. Known as the Central Dogma of molecular biology, it stated that each gene in living organisms, from humans to bacteria, carries the information needed to construct one protein.

The scientists who invented recombinant DNA in 1973 built their innovation on this mechanistic, “one gene, one protein” principle.

Because donor genes could be associated with specific functions, with discrete properties and clear boundaries, scientists then believed that a gene from any organism could fit neatly and predictably into a larger design — one that products and companies could be built around, and that could be protected by intellectual-property laws.

In the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office allows genes to be patented on the basis of this uniform effect or function.

In the context of the consortium’s findings, this definition now raises some fundamental questions about the defensibility of those patents.

“We’re learning that many diseases are caused not by the action of single genes, but by the interplay among multiple genes,” Ms. Caulfield said.

Even more important than patent laws are safety issues raised by the consortium’s findings. ...

“Because gene patents and the genetic engineering process itself are both defined in terms of genes acting independently,” he said, “regulators may be unaware of the potential impacts arising from these network effects.”

With no such reporting requirements, companies and regulators alike will continue to “blind themselves to network effects,” he said.

Now, the field of "Systems Dynamics", celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, is devoted to studying how to describe, analyze, and design complex systems made up of many components interacting in "non-linear" ways -- which is to say, interacting so that any given "function" is carried out by many different components acting in concert.

This property, which I've been calling a "scale-invariant" design principle, can be found at all levels of life, or any computer system, from cellular components to genetic "circuits" to humans in a sports team or office, to scientists themselves doing research, to the role individual corporations have in the ecology of the economy.

The big question in my mind isn't really that genes interact and cooperate in getting their chores done -- it's that our best researchers took 31 years to figure this out, working together, in the face of what is sure to be seen, in hindsight, of overwhelming evidence that it is true.

This gets me back to yesterday's post on "The Power of Yarn", and the single sentence that captured the essence of that for me in the Yarn Harlot's story " There are some truths. Things that just are the way they are, and no amount of desperate human optimism will change them."

One of these truths is that living things operate in complex ecologies, not designed to make life easy to analyze. Another such truth is that "feedback is important" and that, again quoting the yarn harlot,

See how 10 is bigger than 9? See how there is no way that 10 can be made smaller than 9?

I've been asserting almost daily that the "scientific method" has a major weakness, as practiced, in that it focuses our attention on separable parts and analysis based on the General Linear Model, that assumes critically that causality is not circular - that is, that there are no feedback loops. Unfortunately for those who wish for such simplicity, Life is dense with such feedback loops, if not actually defined by such loops.

It is an astonishing fact of life, which the Times article reveals, that the desire for life to be simpler is so powerful that it can cause 10,000 "trained" scientists, with PhD's, to take 30 years to finally collectively observe what others outside their mutual-blindness-field already knew.

As I've said, textbooks such as "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" are in their 5th editions in Control System Engineering, but biologists, and much of public health's biomedical research community, discount that literature to the point of invisibility and effectively treat it with contempt. To them, this literature does not exist. When seen, it "comes as news to them", and is promptly forgotten, because it conflicts with the shared myth of their culture, and cultural myths always win out over boring contrary evidence.

Science, as an enterprise, as practiced by real people in the real world, is not immune or exempt from such behavior. I really must tip my hat to the late Dorothy Nelkin, who gave a graduate seminar back in the 70's or so at Cornell in "The Sociology of Science", for awakening me to this fact, which, as a physicist by training, was "news to me."

Similarly, Science, as an enterprise, and Medical Science as well, should not be astonished, but often are, that people outside their internally-blinding-fields have less regard for the collective ability to discern truth than the scientists inside the myth-field would expect. In fact, it sometimes appears from outside that the "scientific method", as practiced, produces a type of "idiot-savant" who can see with tremendous power along such a narrow trajectory that they have almost complete peripheral blindness. Their history of crashed theories and trail of mistaken certainties are painfully evident to outsiders, but almost invisible from within.

If confronted with the trail of past casualties of the "scientific method" we get a response that "see, it works!" when , as with biology, in only 30 years they get around to being forced to see something that makes their life more inconvenient and part of their training irrelevant or impotent. Comfortable delusion wins out, especially if shared with everyone nearby and only challenged by distant outsiders who are clearly ignorant fools.

So, yet, it is true, that some biologists have started to realize that in some cases Life involves complex systems and feedback. Perhaps in another 30-50 years, this will be dealt with, and, golly, they might realized that feedback crosses the vertical hierarchy and "local" events may in fact be determined by "distal" factors or even social factors. But I won't hold my breath, because, (a) I can't hold it that long, and (b) this fact would be so inconvenient, and such a problem, that it will find some way to be rejected yet again for another 30 years.

Yesterday, somehow prompted by doing the Time's Sunday Crossword puzzle, I came across a history of how the US Military stubbornly refused to see that airplanes could possibly damage ships at sea - a fact that flew in the face of existing "doctrine." Just as Semmelweiss was ostracized and removed for his myth-challenging assertion that it was doctors' dirty hands that were causing women to die in labor or surgery, so Billy Mitchell was court-martialed for convincing the military that their official doctrine had clay feet.

It is a little puzzling that very good researchers, who wouldn't think of peeking at the identifiers of samples in doing a double-blind experiment to defend against bias, can operate in a world with such huge, collective bias against certain ideas and be oblivious to it and resistant to the meta-idea that such bias exists and that they, caught up in that non-level playing field, have a huge effective bias affecting their results that they are unaware of and not properly countering.

If they knew it was there, yes, the would adjust for it. I love scientists. Part of my heritage is science. They're good researchers, but they're simply not familiar with the power of context to focus and blind and bias their very own selves to facts that are trying to leap off the page. Stephen Jay Gould documented much of the power of this effect so well in The Mismeasure of Man, but most scientists haven't read that, or think it doesn't apply to them because "they're very careful."

This is the heart of all the work in high-reliability systems as well-- how to overcome collectively formed mental models and myths and paradigms that have taken hold and are now blinding everyone to facts they should be seeing, but aren't.

Well, maybe at last, with computer modeling and the power of interactive animations, researchers may realize at last that bias comes in many sizes, and the larger models are almost as hard to see from those embedded within them as gravity waves.

It's not just scientists that are prone to this, but many of the rest of us have a little more humility or experience and realize our judgement is not 100% reliable. Scientists when they have checked off the boxes within their own tiny trajectory that has now become their entire world seem, collectively, to lack such humility - sort of an iatrogenic side-effect of the PhD process and of hanging around a very non-diverse crowd that shares the same viewpoint.

These silos of tertiary specialization are the source of much friction, particularly if it is not recognized that the distortion of the perspective of the silo is causing the blindness.

More on this in some later post. It's too important to breeze by, and core to the frustrating battle between religion and science over large-scale social processes.

This is the challenge all organizations, all cultures, all s-loops face -- how to achieve dynamic stability, to be resistant to type-1 errors of being too gullible and believing flashes in the pan, but of being still capable of avoiding type-2 errors - of being to stubbornly fixed on a particular data value, or mental model, or paradigm, or goal-set, or identity that it cannot accept any feedback at all and there is no reasonable way to get updates up to the top where they do any good.

This is perhaps the single largest core cybernetic challenge for a survival-enhancing model.


Wade

Reflections on Human evolution

Nicholas Wade's piece in this weeks Science Times is titled "Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally." (NYTimes.com, 6/26/07).

He begins:

Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

Before looking at that, we need to pause to reflect. There seem to be few topics that set off so many trip-wires and third-rail emotions as the question of evolution.

This is not surprising to me, and fits my model. I had described before what I saw as four levels of disagreement that any self-aware, self-protective, self-healing feedback loop, or "s-loop", has to deal with. These are disagreements about

• Data
• Mental model or frame used to make sense of data
• Goal of all activity (often externally provided)
• Identity (which of this stuff is "me" and which is "other"?)

The levels are successively less questioned and more strongly and emotionally defended if the survival of that level as it is currently constituted is challenged. We talked a lot about "high-reliability" systems and the realization that often the problems were not due to data being wrong, but due to the whole mental model of what is going on that the data feed being wrong. -- and how emotional people, especially superiors, can instantly be if their framework is questioned.

That much (two levels) is generally recognized. (cite - paper from MIT). Even the US Army Leadership Doctrine allows and encourages raising facts that challenge the mental model being used at headquarters, as startling as that seems, because they have realized that too many losses were occurring due to wrong mental models of the situation on the ground. But that concept has not gone gently into the night, and is widely misunderstood and resisted.

Similarly, The Toyota Way or "lean manufacturing" is designed to mercilessly force errors to be surfaced, despite human reluctance and resistance at all levels to discuss "dirty laundry" or "defects" or "errors" or "waste", from employees on the front lines to top management. Face-saving cover-up is the norm in many if not most industries, and is what Toyota has realized is the single thing that damages long-term corporate survival and prosperity the most.

Challenges to what I call the third level, or goals, are even less well tolerated by the existing order and administrative hierarchy or power elite or whatever you call it when people do it, versus machines. The system or s-loops "goal" is pretty tightly protected and defended and not changed lightly. Employees in theory Y enlightened companies can challenge the mental model, but not question the goal of the corporate entity. Military personnel can challenge the mental model, but not the goal of the military. This is becoming "sacred" turf, or, with people, tightly held turf. Again, we have an order of magnitude, or factor of ten times as much emotion raised about challenges on this level as on the second level of frameworks.

Finally, what I call the fourth level of any s-loop is "identity". Goals spring from identity, which is the hierarchical glue that plugs this s-loop into the next larger or higher s-loop that it is part of and belongs to, in several different meanings of the word "belongs to." Any s-loop will be part, at any time, of some larger s-loop. This membership defines who "we" are and what "we" stand for and defend as sacred, and defines our goals locally. It defines what is "us" and what is "not us" so we know what to defend and what to resist or, in some cases, attack.

Challenging identity is another factor of ten more emotional, and harder to do. People tend to fix and lock-down their identity, their goals, and their world-views and defend them to the death, regardless how arbitrarily and unconsciously they were inherited or selected in the first place.

And the question of "evolution" hits at that fourth level, for many people, whether religious or scientific, in equally emotional ways and triggers responses with "religious zeal" among people who define themselves as part of the "science" body and among those who define themselves as part of some "religious" body. Now we're talking "sacred", and "heresy" -- at the "burn the witch!" or "kill the heretic!" level.

Well, I find myself loving both camps, as if I had a parent who was Science and another who was Religion, who are currently "separated" and not living together, and who fight a lot lately, calling each other ugly names and throwing things. It's not pretty.

Still, it seems to me that human life on Earth is at a risky place, where we have the technology to kill ourselves off many different ways, but not the wisdom to manage that technology wisely. And, of all the issues that affect the health of the public, that seems to be central to me, and almost a core issue of what "Public Health" needs to address.

Most of those battles between groups fit into my model of "s-loops" just trying to survive, in a massively-parallel, multi-level soup. Some battles are over boring material resources, such as water, but more and more battles are being fought over the four levels of being - over differences in data, mental frameworks or paradigms, goals, and, most of all, identity.

Who are we, and what are we doing here and why? Those turn out to be questions that are ripping us apart and holding us together, and generating much of the fighting. So we cannot avoid looking at them if we're going to bring this baby through the white water and into peaceful waters beyond.

That said, I can get back to Nicholas Wade's article that triggered this reflection, namely, findings from geneticists that our DNA is continuing to evolve even today. So what? Why is this newsworthy? Is there something we can learn from this that we didn't realize before?

I think so.

First, we can see evidence that evolution represents a closed feedback process these days, perhaps more rapidly than ever before so far as human beings are concerned. Our DNA, at least our children's DNA, appears to be somewhat plastic and responsive, in very short order, to changes in the local environment. That's what Nicholas Wade says. But, we also know that much of the local environment these days is the "built environment", the context that we humans, based on our existing DNA, have constructed for each other to live in or with.

In fact, for most people, the built environment now dominates everything else. We spend far more time being "pressured" by school, jobs, corporations, laws, taxes, pollution, careers, social norms, terrorist threats, and loud stereo's than we do coping with "nature" per se. And these are all things we have built for ourselves.

We are living in our own wake, with good aspects and bad aspects. We inherit culture and high-speed Internet, but we also live in our own sewage. We live in our planet's climate, but we are now large enough to affect that climate.

The point is, it's a closed loop. Most people would agree with that. There is feedback. Again, most people would agree, leaving out those who deny that evolution has or is occurring because that violates their mental model and identity. On this point I'm going with the science, because it's overwhelming and I need conclusions that yield action plans, and because I don't believe at all that evolution in any way discounts God. If anything, it's a more impressive universe and more awe-inspiring if it's not just static, but dynamic.

Having now offended half the religious readers, let me give equal time to offending the scientists.
First, I agree with Stephen Jay Gould that evolution is multi-level, with each having an independent contribution. There are vertical feedback loops, so the "either/or" question becomes a meaningless distinction. Yes, we have genes evolving. Yes we have species evolving. Yes each has pressures at its own level that are mostly independent in the short run.

But, here I'll turn a corner and say that the evolution is of s-loops, not of DNA. And that suddenly means that "corporations" and "nations" and "religions" and "cultures" are just one more kind of life of this planet, that needs to be in the complete ecological picture.

In fact, lately, the evolution of humans seems to have taken quite a turn and is dominated by the evolution of corporations, with their typical nested-hierarchy shapes, being both DNA and more than DNA, being both many people, and more than many people.

Corporations are a new species on the evolutionary stage, and they are becoming the dominant world-reshaping species. This is a rather important observation if we're trying to make sense of what's going on and where it's headed and, if it's broken, where to fix it.

So, we don't just have species co-evolving in a tight feedback loop with DNA and genes -- that's an incomplete model. We have species co-evolving with genes co-evolving with corporations co-evolving with cultures co-evolving with religions, with each one of those providing part of the context for the next step in evolution of each other part. Each part of that equation provides part of the "evolutionary pressure" on each other part. And the parts are all connected if we stand back far enough, so that each part is providing evolutionary pressure ultimately on itself.
In parallel. Simultaneously. Irrevocably interlocked bidirectionally.

This is not a situation that can be understood without using "feedback loops", to put it mildly.

But, the big question is still to come. Are these just "feedback paths", yawn, or are some of these actually s-loops -- self-aware, self-repairing, self-defending, self-extending goal-seeking control feedback loops?

Because, the behavior is extremely different - as different as a hot, muggy, sultry summer afternoon, and one with a tornado. Same air, same moisture, same laws of physics and condensation, but one is a closed feedback loop that feeds and holds itself together, and one is not. I'm not saying that a tornado is "alive", but I am saying that a tornado is "MAWBA",
or "Might As Well Be Alive" in terms of some predictions about future behaviors that are otherwise startling and catch us off-guard.

So, I've made a model of the world that includes what we see in the microscope and what we see in the newspaper at the same time. It's a model of nested s-loops, fighting more or less blindly to survive and sustain their four-levels of being. It's a model where s-loops can merge and join forces, instead of just "winning or losing", and where a handful or a trillion s-loops can pool their identity and form a larger, multi-cellular "being" with an independent, higher-level s-loop, consciousness, awareness, self-protectiveness, etc. (for example, us.)

Again, none of this says one word either way about the existence of God or the "true nature" of what a human being is. It focuses on vertically symmetric, scale-invariant primitive building blocks of s-loops, regardless what material or non-material substrate those operate within or across. That's something that supercomputers can model relatively easily -- the kind of thing that artificial life researchers do on a daily basis, except with a different "payload" or "generating kernel" or "seed" to the process of evolution.

The one really critical new thing here is the idea that dumb feedback pathways can undergo a phase-transition and become self-sustaining, self-defending, self-aware, terra-forming active agents on their own accord, existing semi-independently of the smaller agents that make them up.

This is the observed phenomenon where, effectively, after the pixels have formed a coherent image (whatever that means), the image realizes it exists and "takes on a life of its own" and pulls up the scaffolding used to create it and now starts telling the pixels what to do in order to keep itself alive. ( or if you prefer, to keep itself sustained, or s-loopy, or soliton-izing, or some persisting verb.)

Assuming this is a scale-independent control-loop process, we don't need our microscopes to understand it. We can look out the window. We can watch people form a company, a corporation, that takes on a meta-independent life of its own, and the company can then become self-sustaining, self-repairing, have an identity and a goal and a vision, and can in fact turn on and fire the founding partners because it doesn't need them anymore. It has been born, or radiated or emitted or generated or somehow launched.

This phase-transition should be something that can be mathematically simulated, but I don't know anyone who has done that yet. (Nobel prize waiting for someone!)

If we're looking for how to stabilize or improve relationships between people, or management and labor, or government and citizens, or corporations and "competitors", or between "nation states" or between "religions", it all can be illuminated by understanding what these relatively s-loops can do in the way of "merger" that preserves core values while generating an even higher substrate or vessel in which "life of its own" can be placed by God, or emerge, or whatever it is that happens there.

Something happens there. Something important that we don't fully click to yet.

I think its the key to resolving world chaos and should be looked at more fully. IF we can solve that one, we can catalyze the process and complete the birth process for a planet-sized life-form that's trying to emerge here, held back by our own concepts of life and our role in it.

Let me be clear about one thing. This is not a "reductionist" effort to say that all life on earth is "just" a bunch of atoms or s-loops. I'm at the opposite end. But I'm the first to say that if our bodies have a substrate of atoms, then we should know something about what laws and rules constrain what you can do with atoms, because "we" have to live with gravity and physical injury due to momentum and energy and other physical stuff. Similarly, if we, human spirits, live in or on or above or attached somehow to a substrate that is, above atoms, composed of s-loops, then we would we wise to understand what physical laws constrain those as well, and understand how they can be injured, and how to repair them when they break.

That's not saying that humans are "just" atoms or humans are "just" s-loops. My whole premise is that something miraculous happens in the upward emergent phase transitions that we haven't even begun to grasp yet. Stay tuned.

As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade

So what? part A of why SLOOPS matter

I get tired of writing "Self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, regulatory feedback-mediated control loops" so I'm going to use S-Loops or "SLOOPS" (all caps) to name those in this post.

Again, I need to meet the burden of showing why all this effort is worth it. Where's the payoff? Where's "the beef?" If this doesn't give at least a 10-times improvement over older techniques or frameworks, it's not worth considering, after looking at "transition costs".

OK. So, let me begin showing why this actually helps. Some theory to start, then some fully worked synthetic examples, then some real data. How's that?

First, recapping, I've said that we need to put on lenses that let us spot proto-life, or S-Loops in the sea of interactions going on around us, within us, and that we're within. Those are where I believe "the action" will be for reasons I went into already. Some are the obvious, named parts of "the Ecological Model" -- cells, tissues, organs like the pancreas, body systems like the endocrine system, families, work-groups, departments, corporations, cultures, religions, nation-states.

Then I suggested that maybe this set of what Marsden Bloise called "curiously laminated" levels of life on Earth isn't really many different living things, but only "one" living thing, in the same sense that our circulatory system or immune system is "one" thing, despite having many parts that are, in the short run, not even connected to each other. White and red blood cells appear at first glance to all be off doing their own things. The "ties that bind" are subtle, and not always some kind of physical binding like glue or cement. The "parts" are not always in a fixed or plastic relationship to each other, like our bodies, and can have "gaps" between them (as do blood cells, or the pancreas and various endocrine control centers in the brain.). They are still, in a critically real sense, "one." They act as "one".

But, this is a funny sort of "one". We're used to billiard-ball models, or rocks. We're taught that "one" plus "one" gives you "two". This kind of "one" has a different math, forget calculus, we've already left the building at "addition". We have "one plus one equals ONE" -- where ONE is larger than "one." But it doesn't stop there, because "ONE plus ONE equals ONE."
and "ONE plus ONE equals ONE." So many cells act as "one" body. And many bodies act as "one" corporation. And many "corporations" act as "one" nation-state. -- but each "one" also includes all the previous, "lower" level "ones" too. So corporations are made of people, but people are STILL made of cells. Corporations are big complex organizations of DNA, in fact.
So is the USA. It has the identity of DNA, and the identity of many immune systems and endocrine systems, and the identity of many "people" and the identity of many "subcultures" AND it has an independent identity too, on top of all of that. It seems infinitely branching, almost fractal. (actually, I think it is symmetric across levels, so it actually IS fractal.)

These identities are context-dependent, scale-dependent variables so we have to be careful what kind of math we do with them, and not just "addition."

In the SHORT RUN, with our SHORT RUN lens on, the levels appear to be "obviously" independent and unconnected, although, sure, they "impact" each other a little. Just like blood stream cells impact each other a little as each does its own thing. But that tells us NOTHING about what we see when we rotate the microscope stage to the LONG RUN, large field-of-view lens -- where suddenly all these "different" things are all connected after all and all coordinated and synchronized at a high level, which is almost (but not entirely) invisible at the lower level.

I gave the example of water molecules -- in the short run, molecular interactions are complex and require advanced quantum mechanics and only supercomputers can predict the behavior of a few hundred molecules at one time.

It's the height of arrogance and folly to try to hope to predict one thousand or ten thousand --- using those tools and that base-point and looking upwards.

But, if you keep on going, you get to the scale of household and city plumbing. Suddenly, people who never graduated from high-school are putting in pipes and faucets and getting "water" to do their bidding, and filling glasses with "water" whenever they need a drink. No big deal.

What was impossibly hard from below, becomes incredibly obvious and easy from above. Same molecules. Same you. Different lens.

So, whether things are "many" or "one" is a slippery concept that may be scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent. Whether interactions are "weak" and "loosely-coupled" or "deterministic" is also a scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent type of variable. We can't use our billiard-ball addition, subtraction, and reasoning on such objects -- they have a different system of math. It's very real and very solid, but it's different than we're used to, so our intuition is just terrible regarding it. Our hunches and impressions tend to be wrong most of the time.

So, bring this back down to Earth and focus, Wade.

OK, yeah, here's the thread. It is an important thing to decide how many semi-living things human beings are "one" with already, right now. If we put the boundary in the wrong place, we will get bad predictions on our "what if " thinking.

In my mind, the proper subject of "Public Health" is not the public misperception of "health care for poor people", or "hygene and sanitation", and is not to maximize the sum of the health status of every person, although both of those are virtuous goals. The proper subject is to take care of the health of the living and semi-living entities that are larger than people, including corporations and cultures and nations, going all the way up to Gaia or "all of us."

The "public" in "public health", in my mind, is ONE living thing, ONE highly complex, fractally organized set of DNA in a fantastically complex dance. Viewed through one lens, it is one planet. Viewed through another, it is separate "countries." Viewed through another, it is 6 billion "people". Viewed by a virus, it is some huge number of cells, waiting to be infected.

It's a system, and not a heap, although both have "oneness." The heap, however, just sits there, and a living system, or S-Loop, is self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, and allostatic. In the heap case, our interventions are on a passive lump of clay. In the complex adapative system case, our interventions are on a living Body that has its own equivalent of an immune system and tissue rejection is a very real possibility. Or the patient could be upset by the injection and punch us in the stomach and stomp out and come back with its friends and burn down the clinic.
It is not a lump of clay. It has huge stored energy and active agents within it. And it has a self-identity, and a goal, and will attempt to keep itself aligned with its current concept of its healthy state.

So, much of this is not news. Public Health knows that you can't just walk into a culture and impose some solution and expect it to "take" and expect that you can walk out again and not have your solution thrown out the window after you. Almost every foundation that funds public health interventions in Africa or elsewhere has already learned that lesson the hard way.

One place where this is news is corporate management theory, and the large interest right now in trying to understand why Toyota, coming from behind with about zero to start with, could walk slowly up to and past General Motors and keep on going. Despite the unseemly screeching about "unfair trade practices" and "unfair cheap labor" and "unfair currency valuation", there is a realization that they're doing something right that corporate America better wake up and figure out and emulate while they still exist.

After reading 20 books on "lean manufacturing" and "The Toyota Production Process" and "Lean Six-Sigma", and attending a weeks training and exercises, I come away with this -- Toyota understands the multi-level living model, and aligns itself with that, and GM still thinks the parts of the Body operate best if they are at war with each other.

Economically, especially if you live in Southeastern Michigan near Detroit as I do, this is one very big deal. This is the dominant thing happening on the economic landscape right now, and it has, surprise!, a huge impact on employment, education, health care, and the health of the states, cities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, ancillary services, and physical health of the people who live there.

I have trouble imagining how that could NOT be a proper subject for "public health" to attend to, but some don't share that view.

People are not well because their companies are not well. Their companies are not well because they are pursuing a bankrupt, dysfunctional model of human behavior that ran out of steam in the late 1960's, after McGreggor's Theory Y was published -- but the news hasn't hit many corporate boardrooms yet. Why? Because the companies have banded together to maintain a set of stories and myths about why things are the way they are, in which CEO's are "good guys" with "white hats" and labor, environmentalists, unions, lawyers and terrorists are the "bad guys" with black hats. It's a very powerful story, capable of distorting perceptions and selective attention to discount and ignore incredibly strong evidence that the myth doesn't hold water any more.

Well, I have to go. Let me put in a bookmark here. The bad news, from the point of view of activist "people", is that the level of corporations and managmeent a few levels above them seems to be so short sighted that all hope is lost.

My message is don't despair. It's like the water molecules. I'm sure there are idiots and crooks wearing CEO hats, but there are many good people wearing them as well. And, if you get high enough, as with the water and plumbing example, the ultimate investors, the huge funds, the John Templeton's of the world, are not evil people and are not in a frenzy about making 37% return on their money this week before the dude comes with the tire iron to break their kneecap for the loan they took out and failed to repay. The huge investors would be ecstatic to find ANY place to put a trillion dollars that would even RETAIN its value from year to year, or, wow, maybe even grow 1% in absolute real value. China's bankers are sitting on that kind of money and have that very same problem.

So, while the CEO's seem "high up" and out of reach from below, from far above CEO's are hired guns and "a dime a dozen." They can all be replaced, if there is a better way to make money in a sustainable fashion, with less fuss and anxiety and fewer disrupted golf afternoons. Probably entire nation-states can be replaced if they're in the way by the Club of Rome type crowd, or "organized crime" bosses.

Everyone one of them has the same issues, the same problems, the same S-Loop issues to worry about. Every cell, every tissue, every organ, every body system, every person, every company CEO, every Governor or President has the same set of questions they face daily. These are the ones we need to get better at. FIRST, there are the 7 basic steps of the core S-Loop, that I've gone over before.

Yesterday's picture - above. My Capstone picture below.



Second, there is not ONE loop doing this activity, but millions of them, or at least very many, horizontally at each level of the hierarchy of life. Third, there is a whole fractal tree shape of higher and lower level "ones" doing exactly the same activity in their world, at their level, at the same time, interacting vertically. All that gemisch looks only loosely coupled, but I think a deeper investigation will show that, like the body's immune system or circulatory system, the distal parts are really tightly connected after all, in at least a few important ways.

So, we have one huge, fractal tree shaped collection of DNA, all trying to figure out which way is up and how to survive until tomorrow and make it through today. Everyone is working on the same set of 7 questions, over and over.

where to intervene? John Kenneth Galbraith would call them "mental models", but for public health or psychology these days they are "stories" or "narratives" (or myths) that we tell ourselves, tell each other, and make self-sustaining by passing them back and forth so they don't die out. The ones that link up to make an S-Loop will persist and end up dominating.

So, the intevention points are the boxes in yellow then. These are non-tangible "stories" and changing them will change all the very real, very physical parts of the S-Loop located at the right side of the diagram. The IOM had it perfectly -- use "feedback" to inform and reshape the group, and it will become self-working and self-managing and self-righting without any more "guidance" from management. My addition is, use S-Loop feedback, not just "feedback", and your efforts will be 1000 times more self-persisting and have way less "tissue rejection".

Besides, there's a resonant notch there, so it tends to "click into place" or "snap to grid" if you get close to it. It has a familiar heft and ring. We know this place, because it is us.


As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade