How a new law of nature predicts branching trees, Olympic sprinters and the Tea Party.
It turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. — Paul Krugman
Let’s think about the Tea Party. You may love it or hate it. But it is not an organization run by a secret cabal. Organization happens. The Tea Party works precisely because it is decentralized. No, not completely. It’s flow networks are vascularized according to a rule of thumb called “few large, many small.” And there is science behind such a rule.
But first, consider the media. You have a few large hubs like Fox Cable News, conservative talk radio, major outlets of the right-wing blogosphere (such as Drudge), as well as the Wall Street Journal editorial page both in print and online. These large veins are connected to a lot of middle-tier tributaries — bloggers, pundits and list managers — which are, in turn, connected to millions of network nodes, i.e. “many small” bloggers, email users and local activists.
Now the smallest actors are tiny compared to the Washington Examiner. But they are connected to the flow system, so they’re not just passively receiving information and energy. They’re putting energy back into the system–and lots of it. (If you don’t like thinking about the Tea Party or the right, the same kind of vascular structures can just as readily found on the left.)
Says Who?
An engineering professor at Duke University is an unlikely source for a new branch of biology, economics or political science. But Adrian Bejan shook up the science world when he claimed he’d discovered a new law of nature:
For a finite-size (flow) system to persist in time (to live),” he wrote “its configuration must evolve such that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.
The initial response was a collective furrowing of brows.
But Bejan’s ‘constructal law’ is now rapidly gaining converts in areas ranging from biology to mechanical engineering. Why? Because when Bejan says “system,” he means virtually any system. Professor Bejan sees this principle operating everywhere: “The constructal law can be seen as a universal principle of evolution, which applies in many fields, from physics to economics.” Darwin would be impressed.
The World Through Constructal Lenses
When I came across Bejan’s work, I was still trying to get my head around the insights of ‘complexity theory.’ Complexity is the study of emergence without design and the relationships among parts, wholes and the rules those parts live by. Little did I realize there might be more intimate connections between this branch of science and what Adrian Bejan was trying to tell the world.
Why? Because the world, it seems, is full of currents.
These flows have objectives (e.g., minimization of effort, travel time, cost), and the objectives clash with global constraints (space, time, resources). The result is organization (flow architecture) derived from one principle of configuration evolution in time (the constructal law).
Constructal theory predicts animal design and geophysical flows, and makes evolution a part of physics. In the social sciences, there is substantial literature based on the use of optima to deduce social, population and economic dynamics. The constructal approach … links social sciences with physics, biology and engineering.
Bejan is also famous for explaining ethnic domination in Olympic sports like sprinting and swimming. That’s because, as a theory, constructal science does some serious heavy lifting. If you really want to boil Bejan’s idea down to a simple phrase, I think something like this suffices: Systems evolve according to flow.
Design from the Bottom Up
It turns out the systems that flow best are usually not the ones that are designed or controlled, but the ones that have evolved over time. Constructal engineers are discovering and predicting nature–not just mimicking it. Such is not to say that we shouldn’t try intelligently to design artifacts – like cooling systems – based on lessons of constructal engineering. Bejan is himself a professor of mechanical engineering. Rather, it is to say that the insights of the constructal law should give us humility before those great systems that evolve over time thanks to decentralized processes.
These systems are not objects of “intelligent design.” They are the results of natural tendencies expressed by the constructal law. Economists in Washington would do well to learn this lesson, too, as we move beyond the failed nostra of Keynes — hopefully for the last time.
Max Borders is a writer living in Austin. He blogs at Ideas Matter.
