REAL GENES, REAL INTELLIGENCE 109You may see a leaf caught in an endless cir cuit, going around and
around, under some river rapids without escaping back into the general
fl ow. Again the cir cuit defi nes an attractor state. Such states, exhibiting
a kind of dynamic equilibrium are also called limit cycle attractors. Th ey
will persist until factors like volume and fl ow of the river— perhaps aft er
a storm— change beyond a critical limit. Th en the states break down and
enter a brief period of reorganization (sometimes referred to as “chaotic”)
during which some new stable attractor states may emerge.
Note that, in such dynamical attractors, new structure is arising even
though the constituent ele ments are the same. It is happening without any
directing “executive,” purely as the economic means of dissipating free
energy. Fi nally, the transformation has converted utterly unstructured,
random states into ones that are structured and predictable. For living
things, predictability means information, possibly for survival (see below).
In sum, changeable environments drive many systems toward critical
states. In such states, they can either contain perturbations through equi-
librium dynamics or access chaotic dynamics that can rapidly explore
novel response possibilities. It is now generally accepted that many as-
pects of living beings, operating under rapid environmental change, re-
fl ect the self- organ izing properties of such dynamical systems. I will be
referring to them a lot in what follows.
THE ORIGINS OF LIFEIt is now thought that living things originated from such self- organized
complexity rather than some gene- centered creationism. Th at is, systems
of molecules evolved from chance beginnings into structured attractor
states with energy- dissipating properties.^3 One scenario suggests that
organic molecules, as the early components of such systems, could have
been synthesized during electrical storms in the atmosphere of the early
earth. Th ese molecules rained down on the oceans. Collections of them
created chains of chemical reactions, dissipating the uneven energy dis-
tributions around them. During those reactions, new components— some
of them capable of self- replication— emerged and formed new interactive
structures.
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