'The 1998 fire in Yellowstone burned 1.5 millions acres. In a critical state of course, there is no reason to look for specific causes of really big events. The mere existence of critical organisation means that terrific fires will occasionally break out, no matter what, since the forest is poised on the edge of disaster ...' The author goes on to describe the 'Yellowstone effect', where from 1890 the US Forest Service introduced a 'zero tolerance' approach to fires, but had the unintended effect of leading to more flammable natural matter, driving the forest to 'an even more unstable state, a supercritical state, with burnable material everywhere.' Now they allow smaller fires to burn, and even have prescribed managed burns, removing some of the deadwood and enabling new growth, and reducing the risk of a disturbance creating large scale environmental disaster.
Discusses the 'Big Five' mass extinctions that struck the planet 44, 365, 250, 210, and 65 million years ago.
'Of course, not every extinction is part of a mass extinction. Evolutionary biologists estimate that some few billion different species have evolved at one time or another during the course of life's history. Only a few tens of millions exist today, however, which means that 99 per cent of all species in history are now extinct. Extinction is so natural an event in evolution that as someone once said, "to a first approximation, everything is extinct." As it turns out, only 35 per cent of all species died as part of a mass extinction.'
The false idea of the scientist as an 'automaton driven by the the holy trinity of rationality, objectivity, and open-mindedness':
On the basis of detailed historical studies of how science has really worked in practice, for example, the historian Michael Polyani came to the conclusion that scientists are not actually so open-minded and rational as they would have you believe. ... Instead of always being open-minded,Polyani found, scientists often have their eyes and minds closed.
... (Harvard University's Kuhn) found that scientists did not promptly reject the old theories when they were judged to rationally and objectively to be lacking in the courtroom of facts. Kuhn noticed instead that scientists at any moment seem to be emotionally committed to a shared set of ideas, and will not even consider rejecting these ideas unless their 'maladjustment' to the nature they are meant to describe becomes obviously and intolerably great.
Author discusses history using the analogy of the grain of sand that triggers an avalanche in a sand pile:
'... the largest avalanches are far and away the most influential in terms of the effects they have on the pile. ... how should some historian explain these movements?
Out historian will be sorely tempted to identify certain individual grains as having been massively influential. After all, colleagues will point out that in 1942, an individual grain of immense courage named Granular Columbus triggered an avalanche that ultimately carried grains all the way from the East to the West, and so altered the face of the world and its future. ... For each great event, they can identify some extraordinary grain that touched it off, and perhaps a few others that kept it going at crucial stages. And these grains, they might conclude, are the real agents of history.
Despite being tempted to agree, our historian (a subtle observer of individual character) will have noticed that in the sand world every grain is identical to every other, so there really can be no question of any one being a Great Grain. … By understanding that the pile is always on the edge of radical change, our historian comes to realise that there are always places in the pile at which the falling of a single grain can trigger world-changing effects. These grains are only special, however, because they happened to fall in the right place at the right time. In a critical world, there are necessarily a few great roles and some grains by necessity fall into them.
Might the same be true of human history? There is no denying that some people, by virtue of their personality or intelligence, are more influential than others. And yet it is at least a theoretical possibility that our world exists in something very much like a critical state. In such a world, even if human being were identical in their abilities, a few would nevertheless find themselves in situations in which their ordinary actions would have truly staggering consequences. They might not even be aware of it, as the potential for their actions to propagate might only become apparent as history unfolded. Such individuals might come to be known as great men or great women, as creators of vast social movements of tremendous import. Many of them might indeed be exceptional. But this need not imply that their greatness accounts for the greatness of the events they sparked off.
Just as it is almost irresistibly tempting to seek great causes behind the great earthquakes or the mass extinctions, it is also tempting to see great persons behind the great events in history. But the sand-pile historian comes down firmly against the ‘great grain’ theory of history … Our historian might agree with Georg Wilhel Friedrich Hegel, who concluded that:
‘The great man of the age is one who can out into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he dies is the heart and essence of his age; he actualises his age.’
… what makes an individual notable and ‘great’ is the ability to unleash pent-up forces – the will of the age – and so enable those immeasurably greater forces to have their effect.
In the context of science, Einstein was a genius of the first order. … But the theory of relativity was revolutionary not because of Einstein’s genius, but because it represented a terrific avalanche in the fabric of ideas. Even if scientists were all genetic clones, such revolutionary ideas would still be set off by a select few. To borrow a phrase of the biologist Edward O.Wilson, ‘Genius is the summed up production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.’
It does not seem normal and law-like for long periods of calm to be suddenly and sporadically shattered by cataclysm, and yet it is. This is, it seems, the ubiquitous nature of the world.
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