The Organized Chaos of Biological Mechanisms

By: Johann W. Wiechers, PhD, JW Solutions

Posted: April 17, 2009

The term "chaos theory" could refer to almost everything. Business and private lives are nothing else but organized chaos, the current financial state is organized chaos and offices are in a dynamic state of organized chaos. Chaos seems to be the natural state of mind, our surroundings and our lives. As a counterargument to “green” seeming to be the only natural thing in cosmetics today, I investigated whether “chaos” could be truly the one and only natural thing in cosmetics.

When looking up the definition of chaos theory on Wikipedia, an encyclopedia on the Internet that is in a dynamic state of flux, it said:

“In mathematics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain dynamical systems – that is, systems whose states evolve with time–that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.”

I must admit that these sentences did not make me overflow with joy, especially as I read on about natural systems: “Chaotic behavior is also observed in natural systems, such as the weather. This may be explained by a chaos-theoretical analysis of a mathematical model of such a system, embodying the laws of physics that are relevant for the natural system.”

I was starting to wonder whether there might be a differentiation between chaos theory in physics and biology. Strangely enough, I would describe the physical world as something strictly regulated with low margins of error, but according to this version of Wikipedia, chaos theory rules by seemingly random processes that are dictated by the initial conditions. Biology on the other hand may seem chaotic (e.g., survival of the fittest and so forth) and is typically characterized by much higher margins of error that is conveniently called biological variability but is strictly regulated. But where I am going in this rather chaotic column? Let me tell you that it is about mechanisms, biological mechanisms. How, why and what for?