Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go. Robert M. Pirsig

I know Peter Sagal primarily from his Tweets although I first met him – not in real life, but in the cyberverse – listening to him moderate Wait, wait…don’t Tell Me on NPR and the Nerdette Podcasts in which he had a weekly discussion about Game of Thrones with Greta Johnsen and Tricia Bobeda. They covered each episode the day after it was broadcast with my kind of humor and wit. So, when last January, as a good way to start the year, he suggested a lecture on YouTube from Robert M. Sapolsky, I went along.

It turned out that the lecture was the first lecture of a class on Human Behavioral Biology at Stanford and it was very entertaining (really, very entertaining, watch it, you’ll see). Sometime during the lecture, Dr. Sapolsky gave his reading list and I’m repeating it here in his words: There are two books that I have assigned for the course. One is by me. And you don’t even have to read it. Just go buy a bunch of copies of and bring me the receipt, and you’ve got a great grade in here. OK, so that’s what is going to be pertinent to the second half of the course. We’re going to give you a list of the chapters that make the most sense to read.

The other book is a book by an author named James Gleick called Chaos. Chaos, year, after year, after year, in this class provokes the strongest opinions. A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it. About half the people never quite figure out what’s up with it. And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They no longer have to meditate. They no longer have to have a — they are at peace. At peace, I tell you. Because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology, taking apart a world of reductionism. For 500 years, we all have been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems. Which is, if you want to understand something that’s complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces. And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing.

And what Chaos as an entire field is about — and this was pretty much the first book that was meant for the lay public about it — what Chaos shows is that’s how you fix clocks. That’s not how you fix behaviors. That’s not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock. Behavior is like a cloud. And you don’t understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together. So read through that book. A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological, so we’ll just be suggesting the chapters you should read. I will tell you it is the first book since Baby Beluga where I’ve gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front. Because along with Baby Beluga, it’s had the greatest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college. So that is a sign.

Obviously, I bought the book. But, as I started to read it, I began to worry that I was in the group that would never quite figure it out. I’m dyslexic and got confused and bogged down by the details of the various experiments. I understood the words and the description of the basic theory, but I needed help to really internalize it or grok it. I’ve had the same problem with many things like the Theory of Relativity, Morphic Fields, or Basketball. When I first started watching the Warriors, I knew how the game worked but it was mostly just a bunch of guys running around and I didn’t really understand why. . . until I did, then there were patterns everywhere.

Chaos – and, for that matter, chaos – is like that.

The book starts with Edward Lorenz trying to predict the weather. The basis of the Scientific Method – the basis of most science, really – is repeatability. I’m not sure if Chemistry is still taught in High Schoo but it was when I went to High School. The teacher would explain a principal and we would pair up and duplicate an experiment that illustrated that principal. Everybody got the same answer. That was point, if somebody got a different result, they had obviously made a mistake. But, it turns out, this is not how life actually works. To quote near the opening of the book:

Yet, Lorenz created a toy weather in 1960 that succeeded in mesmerizing his colleagues. Every minute, the machine marked the passing of a day by printing a row of numbers across a page. If you knew how to read the printouts, you would see a prevailing westerly wind swing now to the north, now to the south, now back to the north. Digitized cyclones spun slowly around an idealized glob. As word spread through the department, the other meteorologists would gather around with the graduate students, making bets on what Lorenz’s weather would do next. Somehow, nothing every happened the same way twice.

Michele talks about only really understanding calculus once she had to use it in a physics class. I had a similar experience reading this book; I began to understand Chaos Theory when it started to talk about biology and Evolution. One of my biggest beefs with classical – read that as Darwinian – evolution is that it is based on completely random mutations but the fossil record seems to say that evolution only goes one way, towards complexity, from atoms to molecules, to cells, to sentient beings. That is against the Second Law of Thermodynamics and so is chaos.

Chaos by James Gleick is not an easy read; it wasn’t for me, at least, but it is a book that I’ll recommend to anyone interested in how the world works. I want to end this with a very short quote by Joseph Ford, the past Regents’ Professor of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology, and a lovely, long quote by the playwriter, Tom Stoppard.

Evolution is chaos with feedback.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds -daffodils – waterfalls- and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks…The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.