William Matthew's poem "Mingus in Diaspora" uses the jazz bassist Charles Mingus to meditate on what for many seems the ultimate artistic and aesthetic process. Paraphrasing the musician's words, Matthews, maps the journey a musician must make as his physical labor, as the work of the body, is transformed into an ouvre. The poem argues that as we listen to a musician we are not only listening to a single performance, but to a consciousness which extends to the basic elements of the music making process and hark all the way to the natural world. The musician has to think not only the tradition he belongs to - what other musicians before him have done - but also the elements, the natural history that went behind his instrument. This intricate musical process is a great paradigm for artistic creation. However in another context, in a scientific context, the process might be even more enlightening as it reveals to us what information, complexity and evolution are and how they work together.

Several months ago, the New York Times, ran an article about something called the memoriad, an Olympic style competition where the participants were tested, not for skill on any particular sport, but rather for the way their memory worked. Some of the events involved what seemed like blown-out, prolonged matches of that game called memory. The contestants were to uncover cards and remember their position so that when the same card appeared in another place, they could eliminate both from the line up. Like the many such competitions, this one seem innocuous but trivial. Perhaps because of its triviality and the adulatory tone of the reporter used as he or she related the contestant's feats, a letter to the editor was published several days later belittling the accomplishments of champion and competitor. The letter went on to remind both reader and reporter that one could witness more amazing feats of memory almost any night, granted one would be willing to buy a ticket to a concert and ponder for a minute the real achievements of a concert pianist's memory.

When we see a pianist perform or any musician for that matter, no matter how unskilled or how great, we are in fact witnessing not merely some amazing feat of memory, but perhaps, one of the clearest embodiments of what in this chapter will call complexity. Think about it, the pianist was at one point given a sheet of the music. She probably sight read it. In other words, her sense of sight took in not the sound she produced really, but the symbol for that sound. And while she might have heard it in her head before she played it, what ultimately happened was that her brain, turned the visual information into a sensory-motor one and triggered her fingers to press a chord. What is happening is mind knowing and body remembering, and it might seem completely exclusive to disciplines like music, where precision and some sort of physical display are at hand. Shortly we will see this is not necessarily the case. For the time being, let us continue with our pianist without forgetting that given that the piece of music might be a Bach prelude, she has already finished sight reading the music several times in the same amount of time that it took us to write the description of how she played the first note or chord. In other words, her reading and playing are not only instantaneous events, but also are two of at least 2000 events if the piece is somewhat intermediate in difficulty. Sight, brain and body will, in other words, repeat the same task 2000 times within the span of 3 minutes.

As amazing as the feat seems, we have now machines that can outperform our pianist. The average computer, in fact, given the right software is able to decode the notes and perform them. Computers are to a certain extent complex machines. Nevertheless, the feat of the computer should not be confused with that of the pianist. Many a scientists, including some prominent ones have been infatuated with the computer, the computer revolution and the possibility of artificial intelligence that some extraordinary claims have been made and more embarrassing statements. A couple of examples will suffice. In his book The Physics of Immortality, what could have been a descent account of the concept of the omega point, Frank Tipler turned the argument into a sci-fi fantasy. Tipler's problem was an overreaching logic. His argument ran thus: if we are to evolve further so that our civilization or descendants are able to be part of the afterlife which the omega point promises, then we have to colonize space, because neither the sun, nor the planet will last that long. Embedded in Tipler's sci-fi pipe-dream one also finds the notion that just as earth and the sun will inevitably have their limits, the body and mind does too and only machines, super-computers many generations more powerful than what we know will have to carry on our evolutionary endeavor. The naivete of the concept hinges on the failure to distinguish between a precise and a blanket term. When scientists address the omega point, they think of the confluence of all energy into a single point. Energy that has been organized, they call information. So what they envision is information funneling into this final point of the universe. The problem here is the term. Information, as a concept, has been borrowed from artificial intelligence and the computer community. In the computer world, information is anything that can be codified into binary code. Information does not describe the kind of information, is not precise in other words, it merely is a blanket term a term that describes a process, not a content. To the computer, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Hitler's Meine Kampf, a restaurant's menu or one's tax income returns are all the same, they are information. Tipler is not the only one to flounder when it comes to arguing complexity as inherent to both humans and machines. In fact, one of the most rigorous and absurd arguments for computers as complex is in the first chapter of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker.

So the question arises, how is the pianist different from the computer? How is the pianist complex and the computer less complex or simple? If our pianist is a professional pianist, by the time the pianist she is done sight reading the new piece of music, provided she has never heard it before in performance or in a recording, she will have begun uncovering patterns. The most basic pattern to us humans is rhythm. SO what she'll uncover right away if the way in which the semi-quaver on the left hand create a staccato effect which underscores the melody on the right hand side. She will also note themes being repeated and their variations, dynamics and articulation. Her work, in other words, has all of a sudden shifted. If she started as an automaton, doing the work which any computer would perform, she has now begun to rely on a deeper memory. This deeper melody pivots around the ability to encode not merely information as computers do, but rather the ability to utilize information from the past, the ability to use hindsight to determine an outcome. The latter is a crucial distinction and if not yet a thorough definition of complexity, it definitely gets nearer. We use the word hindsight knowingly. After all computers perform tasks through memory, through their application programs. They do not have hindsight, they cannot, in other words, rely on that programmed memory to determine the outcome: theirs is an automaton's task, the same outcome will emerge every time. So by using the word hindsight to describe the pianist's process, we are making a crucial distinction.

We are also being ridiculous in the way we have simplified the process, since even before the pianist begins her second run through the piece, she has begun place the music in context. This is hindsight and memory with a vengeance, the documented kind, the kind that is passed as knowledge generation after generation and as such, it is the most difficult to deal with because is the most amorphous and shifty. Let's just look at what happens. Before she even opened the music for the first time, by merely knowing who had written the music when, the pianist was already aware of the sort of sound that the music would create. Her memory, in other words, had stored the kind of idioms that a composer writing at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century would use. And whether the music was famous like late Haydn, early Beethoven or more obscure like a Dussek sonata, she already had some idea of how she would use the pedal, articulate the phrases and choose her tempos. So in the second run, what she'll be doing is even more difficult, she will begin uncovering the individuality as well as the message of the piece of music. The hindsight now becomes more overreaching. It not only makes some decisions, it begins to compare and contrast with a broad databank stored in the pianist's mind. She will perhaps uncover how a certain passage echoes a style or a phrase by other composer; she might realize that the staccato here has a nervous quality that the staccato from another piece lacks, etc.

In the previous chapter we discussed chaotic systems. What we have here is the ultimate chaotic system. The outcome cannot be determined because there are to many variables. What we also have here is complexity's greatest gift, a body - and mind you, it is not merely the pianist mind, but the work of her entire body - which can determine the outcome of a chaotic system. For if we jump ahead, for brevity's sake, to the moment when the pianist has finally memorized and understood the entire piece, we would witness will, consciousness, memory, hindsight choreographing the pianists arms, legs, feet, wrists and fingers to produce a foreseeable outcome. To call this work merely information, to imagine that it can somewhat be quantified and stored into a binary code is not merely to be reductive, but to be stupid. Yes, we can buy the performance pressed on a disk, we can buy what the pianist does and pop-it into our CD player. Yes, the player reads ones and zeroes and transforms them into sound. But it is an awful mistake to think that because we can play back the pianists work it can be reduced to ones and zeros. What we have is a record a record of a moment, a record of a consciousness at work, we do not have the consciousness itself. This is a crucial distinction which somewhat scientists have failed to make as they argue information as a blanket term.

Complexity as we have defined then involves so far three things, the use of memory and hindsight to predict an outcome and the ability to transform chaotic systems into foreseeable consistent outcomes. The last thing, and one which we have not mentioned because it is too obvious to mention but also too important to omit, complexity is the filter that takes energy, distils it and transmogrifies it, so to speak. To be simplistic here, when we pay our ticket or get our ticket's worth at some recital, we are witnessing the pianist's lunch and all the other stuff that sustains her body turn into another kind of energy, sound of course, but sound with semantic and emotive undertones.

It has been our argument throughout that the complexity that our pianist seems to embody is not exclusive to artists or to humans, but that it is deeply embedded not only in life, thus laying an arrow to the path of evolution, but also in matter itself. Both of our contentions are polemical. We have seen already how prominent scientists like Stephen Jay Gould have dedicated a lifetime of work attempting to belie the existence of any direction, of any arrow in evolution. Similarly, prominent physicists have argued that energy is energy, information, information and that there is no distinction between the pianist's lunch and the pianist's performance, they are both quantifiable. Furthermore, they have argued that because energy is energy and information is information, that there is no evidence to the claim that complexity is inherent to matter.

All of their arguments seem at first cogent. After all, anybody that wants now can go and download the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica, or read all of Shakespeare's plays or play a computer game online. To both computer and server, there is no distinction between Shakespeare and the Mario brothers. The processor will read all material as either zero or one and the computer will use the same amount of electricity every minute, whether the user is getting through Beethoven or downloading junk mail. So, the question that emerges for those of us who refuse to accept the reductionism which computer and physics terminology seem to have condemned us to is, is there anything in the sciences which would seem to belie the fact that all energy is equal and all information is equal? Is there anything, in other words, that seems to at least hint at the fact that even though all systems consume the same energy, as their level of complexity increases the energy they utilize is not only utilized much more effectively but it is actually transformed into useful information?

As it has been the case throughout this book, evolution, despite its lack of predictive precision seems to hold the key. One the most striking things about getting through The Origin of the Species, perhaps even more striking than seeing Darwin's mind at work is the underlying sorrow, the very awareness of suffering that Darwin brings to his theory. Not a cold blooded lab coat man, but an inquisitive one who in finding that neither innovation nor conservation but selection was the key to the theory, Darwin is constantly aware that for every member of a species that manages to pass on its genetic material, there are as many or more that perish in the process. In fact, one of Darwin's central dictums might be the following one:

In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind -- never forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase its numbers; that each lives by a struggle in some period in its live; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals.

The awareness of destruction and death is central to evolution. And in understanding its role we can begin to reconsider whether we want to keep thinking of both energy and information in such undiscriminating manner.

Selection is a double edged sword. The reason for selection, the reason why within a species too many members are doomed to perish before they pass their genetic material, why so many of the old die is because the resources are scarce. In other words, selection is one way in which nature is able to allocate resources, a way in which nature has been able to conserve energy. Because so many members of a given species will perish, the species will survive. At the same time, we should not forget that in the death of each of the members of the species, one has the complete loss of a unique piece of information. It is this gain/loss dichotomy that requires balance. The trade of energy for information, the trade of resources for one less genetic imprint has to be, in Darwin's words, constantly held in "check." Otherwise, the population if either depleted or more likely will skyrocket till it depletes its own resources and starves, till it consumes all of its energy. Imagine a herd of whales. Imagine that we would return to the indiscriminate hunting of the whale as we did in the 19th century. If these whales were to go extinct, what we would loose would not only be a central player in a given ecosystem, but since these whales are also an intelligence, a particular way of understanding the world. The loss would be a loss of knowledge which will be never again passed down or evolve. Imagine similarly, what happened in the 17th century as colonizers subdued and finished entire nations and those nation's languages disappeared. What we lost was their cuisine, their medicine, their valuable information, their valuable ways of understanding the world.

How does Darwin's insights into selection redefine the current concepts of both energy and conservation? The answer lies in his emphasis on balance, of his insistence that this system, despite its cruelty and the suffering that it entails, is a fine tuned one. For in insisting so, what Darwin underscores is the way in which a complex organism, an organism whose existence depends on a molecule encoded with complex information depends on a larger network. In other words, for Darwin, energy and information are neither being utilized nor transferred in a void. They are part of a larger system. Darwin's insight is of course the very seed from which ecology grew. But before we discuss ecology, let us look at how in thinking of information and energy in a larger context, we can begin to redefine both.

To do so we will resort to a rather simplistic and makeshift scenario. It is, of course, hard to discuss humans as being part of an ecosystem at this late date. Our presence in the planet has been one which more than any other has managed to upset those very checks and balances Darwin mentions. Nevertheless, our scenario, because, despite its simplistic nature, is not really far from reality, should serve to illustrate. We draw our sustenance, our energy from the food we consume. Our bodies are factories that process lipid, protein, carbohydrates and turn them into fuels that not only keep the body but repair it too. Different fuels, protein or carbohydrates, produce different results. Sugars, for instance, are a super fuel, they give a rush, but they also burn fast. They have no stay. For centuries, the culinary habits of the general population seemed quite balanced when food was available. (One should not forget, that starvation due to bad crops or urban poverty have also been a mainstay throughout the history of civilization) Still the peasant's diet consisted of grains and vegetables and left meat to special occasion. This balanced diet is still making the news as we have grown more aware that the Mediterranean diet seems much more healthy than other Northern diets.

The first culinary revolution came, as all revolutions do, at the heels of another revolution. Excessive diets, diets rich in fat and sugars were the sole domain of royalty and the moneyed. Careme, the first Chef who began to systematize what we now call classical cuisine spent the bulk of his life serving in the kitchen of the aristocracy. His dishes are elaborate, even visually cloying. However, once the French Revolution deposed the old aristocracy, many of the chefs who served the rich and the noble found themselves out of a job. It was then that the restaurant went from being a place where one went to get a restorative - hence the name - to a place where one could go and try the rich, elaborate dishes which were reserved for the rich or which the middle classes and the poor only tried on special occasions. This revolution was a semantic one. It transformed the meaning of food. Lamb, reserved for spring and Easter, for instance, was now available daily. Cuisines began to develop, not along the lines of local produce and local grains, but along the lines of the flavoring fats which were utilized to flavor. Even today, we distinguish French from Italian cuisine because of the fats they use. The former uses butter, the latter olive oil.

While this semantic revolution in eating habits was still tenuous as far as everyday diet was concerned, it definitely propelled or at least abated the subsequent culinary revolution. Like its counterpart, the second culinary revolution came at the heels of another revolution, this time an economic one. As WWII came to a close, the United States experience wealth as no other nation in the world had ever experienced it. The "American Dream" car, house, economic security, etc., came nearer and nearer to fulfillment, at least for many. Where there is some measure of economic security there is always a merchant willing to partake of the riches. One of the merchants who benefited in a phenomenal way from this plenty were those who standardized and industrialized food. In a culture where food had lost its meaning, where a roast was as common as bread, where food and occasion were divorced, it was not hard to turn meat, which was a rare staple into the main one. Today, as Eric Schlosser, in his book Fast Food Nation reminds us, McDonalds is the main consumer of beef in the planet. As such they determine how most beef is grown, fed, butchered and prepared. They set the first part of our scenario because they are what seems the main providers of energy for a large sample of the population around the world.

The question is what kind of energy do they provide and to what expense? Eric Schloesser has argued that the expense of fast food is overwhelming as it taxes unskilled laborers as well as the environment. As Eric Schlosser reminds us in his book Fast Food Nation, the shift from family farm to "industrial complexes" which have been allowed to "dominate one commodity market after another" has come at an ecological price. While the expense in the industrialization of food has been human: the meat packing industry has gone from being "a highly skilled well paid job, to "the most dangerous job in the United States" performed by unskilled, "transient, immigrants." In return for all the human and natural resources, the consumer gets poor nutrition: "As people eat more meals outside home, they consume more calories, less fiber, and more fat." The low quality of the food is evidenced by the way in which in the last few decade, as fast food chains have moved across the globe, the rate of obesity increases.

One of Schloesser's central arguments is that even though it might seem so, the fast food revolution is not inevitable. And in fact, many who refuse to partake of the fast food culture, still offer an alternative. For there is an alternative to the high energy consumption low energy return in the fast food equation and it is an old one. The home cooked meal has been the answer to the low efficiency of industrialized food. Open any ethnic or regional cookbook and there you'll find not the formula of an industry, but knowledge of the seasons and the products of the earth, knowledge also about how to prepare and how and when to eat. It is a special kind of knowledge and it is ancient. It takes into consideration no just resources, but how these resources can be used to the fullest, for in the regional diets we find people interacting and not merely exploiting their environment.

What we have here, in our two examples then, the McDonalds one and the home cooked meal one is the ways in which energy can be used. The former is low grade energy, the latter is slightly more efficient. We also have our neurons processing flavors, smells, textures. The former is bland, artificially flavored, known. In other words, with McDonalds we get "processed" information. To process the braise, our brain is stimulated, given new information.

What we ultimately end up if we look at our two dishes is what complexity means and its counterpart. For as we have seen several times through this chapter is that complexity is the way in which energy gets conserved. This conservation occurs because in whichever instance, the system using up the energy produces more than what it started with. The counterpart of complexity is not, as many would think simplicity or disorder, but waste. Waste is what happens when those Darwinian checks get out of balance. Imagine an ecosystem like a municipal park. Smack in the middle of an urban area, its denizens include many pests, rats, pigeons, etc. If the park is large enough, it might be able to house larger mammals, raccoons or even deer. Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, the largest municipal park in the world is a case in point. Large mammals require large amounts of space to roam and feed. But more than that, they require a check in the spread of the population. The contemporary problem of the overpopulation of deer is in fact a good example of a system that has lost its balance. The wolf, the deer's natural predator, has been near extinction due to an obsessive, pathological hunting since the beginning of this century. Unchecked, any population will soar. And so has the deer population in Fairmount Park. This lack of balance has affected various species in the park. Some have thrived and some have not. The deer tick, a noxious and resilient animal has become one of the most dangerous nuisances, carrying diseases like Lime disease. The vegetation, on the other hand, has not. In fact, the forest that makes up most of the park has been dying and will die unless measures are taken to reduce the deer population. Deer are eating their resources away. And this very situation is the exemplification of waste. This is a system utilizing energy toward its own demise. If they would be allowed to eat the forest away, the deer would starve and die. And at the end the sum of this energy would come up to zero. The genetic material of both plant and animal, their genetic information would not be passed down. Waste is when energy is consumed toward a zero-sum total.

The reverse of any zero-sum total, the counterpart of zero-sum totals is of course complexity. Many people who have misunderstood Teilhard de Chardin have argued that in his writings, one can see the same old sort of predestination mysticism which abounds in writers like Bergson. They argue that Teilhard de Chardin has imposed an arrow to evolution, a direction which is false. Theirs is certainly a mistaken reading. In fact, if Teilhard de Chardin's writing would excel all but the very best writing on evolution done this century was because he was prescient enough to eliminate the idea of pyramids in his discussion of evolution and replaced them instead with two concepts: complexity and the radial. Both concepts are complimentary. In fact the radial is, so to speak, the visual manifestation of complexity.

We have all discussed in a previous chapter Teilhard de Chardin's definition of radial energy. But for Teilhard de Chardin the image of the wheel with its spokes shooting out everywhere is more prevalent that just to describe an energy which works beneath detectable levels. One might say that once he identifies the functions of radial energy, he is canny enough, like a Greek geometrician, to understand that what informs at a small scale has to form at larger scales. If radial energy's sway can curb entropy and balance forces, then it must be because its structure is effective in the in way which we have been discussing affectivity: it must put out more than what it consumes. But there is more. In finding an effective structure, one finds a structure that replicates itself with tiny variations. This idea of replication with variations is one which fractal mathematics has elucidated more than any other discipline.

Like Chaos, fractals are a rather modern branch of math. Despite its newness, however, its impact has been pervasive across the sciences. What fractal mathematics argues are two things. There are initial structures that replicate themselves in larger scales. One of the prime examples that they use is a coastal map. If one where to gradually zoom out from 1 meter to 100 meters and see the structure of the coasts, what one would end up would be the same geometry repeated with minute variations on a larger and larger scale. The second implication of fractal mathematics is that by detecting structures that replicated successfully in order to fend disorder and entropy, it also sets certain guidelines as to the possible "evolution" of an entity or system. In order to understand this it is useful to go back to our coastal map. The coast is a structure that has been carved by erosion and geological forces. As a structure it fends off pressure and gravity. And though it slowly erodes id does so over a long period of time. The way its bed, rocks and shoals are formed allows the coast to fend off the forces that would destroy it. If a rock were smaller, or if its shape would not let water in and out, the pressure would crumble the structure down. What the replication of certain small into larger scale allows for is the stability of the larger structure.

Teilhard de Chardin understood this intuitively and found in the radial structure the seed to any organization of larger structures, the seed, in short, to complexity. There are few points that have to be made about this structure and why it serves as the seed to complex structures. The radial structure is not, however, hierarchical. Unlike the pyramid that prioritizes and privileges base or crest, and unlike the arrow that sets a direction, the radial structure only allows for interaction and interdependence. In other words, a radial structure creates a network in order to understand evolution. Evolution, under that light is not some game of endless mutation that occur through trials and errors nor some orchestrated phenomenon. On the contrary, evolution is the testing of a structure's viability and in that testing one finds accretion of possibilities and the widening of the initial network.

Many find Teilhard de Chardin's vision merely poetic. However, the radial structure is literal. We find its variation s every time we turn and observe the ways in which nature has curbed entropy, chaos and disorder. We find it in the atom. For as we know now, the orbital model has been replaced for a more amorphous one and despite the amorphousness of the new model, what we end up here is a model of interdependence between "spokes" and center. We find another more impressive variation is one of the most imposing structures to have ever emerged in nature's attempt to fend entropy, the DNA molecule. Here, unlike the in the atom, we have the beginning of an unfolding of a structure that in its initial models was static. Still the centered spokes are there. This time the interdependence, the network is deeper. And if it was deeper it was because finally the radial structure was able to store information. The network, which was merely a protein chain was finally able, as a system, to produce more than itself by a method other than juxtaposition, which was the method by which atoms linked to form stable matter. It could process energy, heat, light and polymerize, replicating over and over. From then the story is well known and has been told several times by some of the most eminent minds.