which art and language evolved, it’s logical that our brains and the artis-
tic forms that emerge from them partake of the same bias. What the last
three centuries have shown is that if we short-circuit our natural bias
toward order and beauty, relying instead on reductionism and chance to
produce books in “Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Mathematicks and
Theology,” we will wind up with the same fragmented and meaningless
nonsense cranked out on Swift’s absurd frame.
II
To avoid the errors that have plagued modern thinkers from Descartes
to Derrida, we have to place language and literature within a larger
hierarchy of symbol systems. After all, the human brain that produces
language is itself produced by the coded symbol system of DNA—a
code shared by all other living things in the eco-systems of planet
Earth. Each individual human being also exists within the complex
symbol system of a human culture, which in turn exists within a larger
natural economy. Each of these systems is complex and dynamic and
interacts with the others in a general level mixing, involving countless
exchanges of information.
A key function of higher-level systems is their ability to make mod-
els. John Holland, one of the pioneers in artificial life, observes, “All
complex, adaptive systems—economies, minds, organisms—build
models that allow them to anticipate the world.” To illustrate how con-
text affects the model-making adaptations of living things, he points to
the viceroy butterfly, an insect apparently appetizing to birds. To prevent
itself being eaten, the viceroy butterfly has evolved a pattern on its
wings that resembles the awful-tasting monarch butterfly. “In effect,”
writes Holland, “the DNA of the viceroy encodes a model of the world
stating that birds exist, that the monarch exists, and that monarchs taste
horrible. And every day, the viceroy flutters from flower to flower
implicitly betting its life on the assumption its model is correct.”
The butterfly’s modeling does not depend either on the conscious
intentions of the butterfly or an intelligent designer, but on the behav-
ior of the complex adaptive system in which it lives and the self-organ-
izing properties of living things. It is a beautiful example of what
science now calls “downward causation,” a process in which higher lev-
els of organization reach down and influence the operation of lower
level ones. In the case of the viceroy butterfly, the larger ecosystem has
reached down to fiddle with its DNA code to select for the monarch
pattern on its wings.
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 151