An Introduction

In his path-breaking book, Beyond Reductionism (1969), the famed novelist and polymath Arthur Koestler remarked that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." He was talking about synergy, of course, a phenomenon that is still greatly underrated and vastly more important even than Koestler imagined. I call it "nature's magic."

Synergy is in fact one of the great governing principles of the natural world; it ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, information and entropy as one of the keys to understanding how the world works. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe; it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on Earth; it played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind; it is vital to the workings of every modern society; and it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends on it. Indeed, every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy.

All of these grandiose-sounding claims are discussed in detail, with many hundreds of examples, in three of my books: The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Nature's Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Holistic Darwinism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as in many of my articles for professional journals. Some of these publications are available at my website: http://www.complexsystems.org/

The purpose of this blog is to provide a continuing update on synergy and an opportunity for some dialogue on this important and still underappreciated phenomenon, along with commentaries on various topics - political, economic, and social -- from a synergy-monger's perspective. The tag-lines for each entry, with a "thought for the day," are the unregulated firecrackers that go off in my mind from time to time.

Peter Corning pacorning@complexsystems.org

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Friday, June 13, 2008

Letter to The New York Times Regarding Primary Reforms

One option for reforming the primary system that I hope Senator Feinstein and the Congress will consider is a schedule with a sequence of (say) three Super-Tuesdays (or better yet, Super-Saturdays), where the states are clustered by size. Thus, a set of geographically-diverse small states (Iowa, New Hampshire and others) might lead off in February as initial “testing grounds,” followed by a group of mid-size states perhaps in March and by all of the large states in May. With such an arrangement, all states would have a voice, small states would play a significant part (and provide an opportunity for unknowns), but the outcome would not be definitively settled until the final inning. Such a system would also be more likely to arouse and sustain voter interest and participation. The problem, I know, is to get the states to cooperate. Maybe they could be persuaded (once again) to help form “a more perfect union.”
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