The
world is a complex place. A very complex place. In a vote to determine the most
complex thing in our 4 dimensions, probably held by the editors of the Daily
Telegraph, the world be would sure fire winner - even without canvassing or a
campaign endorsed by a professional wrestler. You may very well be of the
opinion that setting up your wireless router is fairly complex, but the world
is at least 3 times as complicated as that. At least. (Upon the inclusion port blocking the iPlayer,
this comparison is of course reversed.)
What makes the world complicated is that there an awful lot of things in it, and all of them are vying to be continue being in it. Some of them even want to be able to have access to online tutorials on how to get salsa stains out of the curtains from anywhere in the house, which only makes things worse. As one of these things, we take our competition with the other things to extreme levels; we have long since won our war against the insidious Dodo and are well on our way to crushing the last dying breaths from the dangerous and vitriolic practice of being nice to one another for reasons other than personal gain. We raise our arms to the blackening sky with each victory, safe in the knowledge that simplification is under way, and no-one needs to be helped out by anybody else with anything, or heavens forbid smiled at by a stranger.
As the dust settled on the last remaining Dodo skeleton (because the nice lady who volunteered to clean it was executed as a war criminal) an observation was made by a manipulative bastard, who was able to alert his networked acquaintances from the comfort of the space behind the boiler. The observation read thusly - the removal of some elements of a very complex system makes the other aspects of a very complex system behave differently, in a very complex way. After waving his networked device around a lot in order to find what paltry signal he had available, this particular bastard played no further part in proceedings. We shall assume he contracted typhoid.
The problem with how certain people perceive this observation is the same problem that the same people have when trying to unwrap sweets with their mouth, namely that they have everything the wrong way around and paper tastes awful. They remove one element from the overall system and watch as the butterfly effect takes place, causing the extinction of a subspecies of bee, begetting a fall in the numbers of rare flora and a sharp increase in the number of people willing to sit in a coffee shop to exploit the free wi-fi and discuss the lack of bouquets available to bribe their partners into forgetting that they shot the dog last weekend. At this point they make a bold declaration, a challenge to fill the gauntlet before it is cast down . "It all relies on a few too many coincidences doesn't it? This can't all have happened by chance or mistake?". They are taking something from the end of the system and saying that they could never work out how it affects everything else, let alone build the entirety of the rest of the system from it, therefore it can't be done. They're not so much putting the cart before the horse as taking a newspaper which happened to fall into one of the boxes being transported, looking at the horse and claiming the situation could never have happened by chance because they don't know what a cart is. They are expecting to be able to take a shiny new wireless router and infer the existence of the dinosaurs which must have died to become the oil which is manufactured to produce the plastics moulded to form the casing of the router itself.
The interwoven cycles and creatures are not cosmic coincidences, neither is the suitability of Earth for the life on it too convenient to have happened by chance. The wrapping paper is stuck between the teeth of ignorance, but it just so happens that there are toothpicks on the table. The life on the planet exists because it is one of the possibilities opened up by the presence and proportions of the chemicals on it and the conditions that they produce when coupled with the positioning and behaviour of the planet in the solar system. The various species are interwoven because they co-evolved that way and anything which didn't fit into the harmonious plan was incapable of continuing to exist because it didn't fit in, and nothing else wanted it to (see also: Jim Davidson). The complex relationships we observe are the result of a set of billions of criteria and how they interact, what they allow and what they don't. You can look at a piece from a jigsaw but you can't infer the whole picture from that one piece. Tragically, and as with so many otherwise perfectly interesting subjects for an infographic passed around at the kind of dinner party you wish you were invited to so that you could detail why you don't want to attend, it just comes down to statistics and very, very, very big numbers. Like, 6 or something, I don't even know.
So yes, everything may seem like an incredibly unlikely series of coincidences at this stage, but only if you're looking at it cross eyed and through a mirror behind wrong-tinted glass.
What makes the world complicated is that there an awful lot of things in it, and all of them are vying to be continue being in it. Some of them even want to be able to have access to online tutorials on how to get salsa stains out of the curtains from anywhere in the house, which only makes things worse. As one of these things, we take our competition with the other things to extreme levels; we have long since won our war against the insidious Dodo and are well on our way to crushing the last dying breaths from the dangerous and vitriolic practice of being nice to one another for reasons other than personal gain. We raise our arms to the blackening sky with each victory, safe in the knowledge that simplification is under way, and no-one needs to be helped out by anybody else with anything, or heavens forbid smiled at by a stranger.
As the dust settled on the last remaining Dodo skeleton (because the nice lady who volunteered to clean it was executed as a war criminal) an observation was made by a manipulative bastard, who was able to alert his networked acquaintances from the comfort of the space behind the boiler. The observation read thusly - the removal of some elements of a very complex system makes the other aspects of a very complex system behave differently, in a very complex way. After waving his networked device around a lot in order to find what paltry signal he had available, this particular bastard played no further part in proceedings. We shall assume he contracted typhoid.
The problem with how certain people perceive this observation is the same problem that the same people have when trying to unwrap sweets with their mouth, namely that they have everything the wrong way around and paper tastes awful. They remove one element from the overall system and watch as the butterfly effect takes place, causing the extinction of a subspecies of bee, begetting a fall in the numbers of rare flora and a sharp increase in the number of people willing to sit in a coffee shop to exploit the free wi-fi and discuss the lack of bouquets available to bribe their partners into forgetting that they shot the dog last weekend. At this point they make a bold declaration, a challenge to fill the gauntlet before it is cast down . "It all relies on a few too many coincidences doesn't it? This can't all have happened by chance or mistake?". They are taking something from the end of the system and saying that they could never work out how it affects everything else, let alone build the entirety of the rest of the system from it, therefore it can't be done. They're not so much putting the cart before the horse as taking a newspaper which happened to fall into one of the boxes being transported, looking at the horse and claiming the situation could never have happened by chance because they don't know what a cart is. They are expecting to be able to take a shiny new wireless router and infer the existence of the dinosaurs which must have died to become the oil which is manufactured to produce the plastics moulded to form the casing of the router itself.
The interwoven cycles and creatures are not cosmic coincidences, neither is the suitability of Earth for the life on it too convenient to have happened by chance. The wrapping paper is stuck between the teeth of ignorance, but it just so happens that there are toothpicks on the table. The life on the planet exists because it is one of the possibilities opened up by the presence and proportions of the chemicals on it and the conditions that they produce when coupled with the positioning and behaviour of the planet in the solar system. The various species are interwoven because they co-evolved that way and anything which didn't fit into the harmonious plan was incapable of continuing to exist because it didn't fit in, and nothing else wanted it to (see also: Jim Davidson). The complex relationships we observe are the result of a set of billions of criteria and how they interact, what they allow and what they don't. You can look at a piece from a jigsaw but you can't infer the whole picture from that one piece. Tragically, and as with so many otherwise perfectly interesting subjects for an infographic passed around at the kind of dinner party you wish you were invited to so that you could detail why you don't want to attend, it just comes down to statistics and very, very, very big numbers. Like, 6 or something, I don't even know.
So yes, everything may seem like an incredibly unlikely series of coincidences at this stage, but only if you're looking at it cross eyed and through a mirror behind wrong-tinted glass.
