Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (25 page)

Looking back, I can see that my parents were absolutely right. The Forty-sixth Street Boys were not only a bad influence on me, leading me to sneak out of church on Sunday to smoke Luckies and drink Gallo port wine, but they were seriously rotten friends. They ridiculed me for attending Regis, which they claimed was full of “brown-nosed
faggots” (the term then used for intellectual nerds). They made fun of me for being tall and skinny, for having a big nose and big feet, and the bigger ones bullied me mercilessly, then called me a “punk” when I backed away from fistfights with guys like Martie Magno, who was built like Al Capone and who liked to pound his opponents' heads against the pavement to finish up his fights, which he never lost. Although I was at the very bottom of this hierarchy of hooligans, I continued to strive for their acceptance instead of hanging out with other skinny geeks, who actually valued the intellectual pursuits at which I might have excelled. While wasting endless hours at the park enduring ridicule from this pack of bullies, I completely ignored any intellectual pursuits. Instead, I stopped studying and was expelled from Regis (hoping that the tough guys would stop treating me like a nerd if I didn't go to a nerdy school).

My expulsion from Regis was not the end of the downhill slide precipitated by hanging out with the wrong crowd. Within six months, I got expelled from another Catholic high school—Power Memorial—this time for cutting up in class and continuing my moratorium on studying. Fulfilling my parents' greatest fears, I ended up bebopping down the halls of Bryant High in street clothes, right alongside the glue-sniffers. My parents decided to move the family out to Long Island, a migration designed in part to get me away from the neighborhood before I became one of the serious troublemakers and followed in the footsteps of my long-lost biological father, who was at that time residing in Sing Sing.

Although my family's move to Long Island saved me from one bad crowd, I never fully recovered from my inclination to hang out with troublemakers. I was almost expelled from college after coming to class drunk and heckling my first psychology professor. I had been
out drinking in the middle of the day with two of my old greaser friends who were on leave from the navy. I was in a community college, and on academic probation, toying myself with the idea of joining the navy.

Although I did not usually listen to my stepfather, he was successful in convincing me that, given my problems with authority, I would hate the military life. Furthermore, there was a nasty war raging in Vietnam, and several of my old friends had already been killed there. Uncle Sam was still giving college deferments then but was drafting people as soon as they dropped out. That made expulsion from college a possible death penalty. So I got serious about my studies, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed college courses when I actually did the assigned readings. I began to realize that I was much better suited for the life of the mind than life among the tough guys with tattooed biceps.

But even after I completed my return trip to the world of intellectual nerdhood, I continued to seek the company of rebellious characters. In the academic world, the rebellious crowd tends not to break windows, start fistfights, or beat up old ladies. But they do like to break conventions, start arguments, and overturn old ideas. In the 1990s I came under the influence of two such intellectual badasses. One was Guy Van Orden, a new assistant professor at ASU. The other was Bibb Latané, one of the most successful brainiacs in the field of social psychology. Although Guy and Bibb had not themselves met at that time, they were members of the same intellectual gang, and they both led me astray in the same direction.

Guy Van Orden came to ASU after studying cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego. Like me, he had not come from an academic background. He was from a Mormon family in Idaho, but he didn't fit any of the stereotypes about Mormons. Guy was not the polite, well-behaved, teetotaling young fellow carrying the Book of Mormon to your door. His appearance and behavior were closer to those of a guitar player in an alternative rock band, complete
with black sneakers and a ponytail (in fact, one of Guy's subselves was a musician). Guy could drink most Germans under the table, and at departmental parties, he would still be standing, beer in hand, at four in the morning, arguing about philosophical ideas.

Guy's favorite topic to fight about was not religion, drugs, or politics but philosophy. When we talked about the philosophy of science, Guy would attack me with terms like “reductionist” and “determinist,” which he used like a born-again Christian would use “sinner” and “heretic.” I would shout back at him, “Of course, I'm a reductionist and a determinist! And I can't see why you spit those terms out like insults. It's called science!” To me, opposition to “determinism” was an intellectual cop-out, a ploy used by social constructivists who were too lazy to do actual research and wanted to use big words to mask their unwillingness to look rigorously at the natural world. But Guy was not some lazy intellectual bullshitter; he was a tough-thinking scientist and a fan of an alternative scientific perspective called “dynamical systems theory.”

Bibb Latané is a prominent social psychologist who entered the field a couple of decades before Guy Van Orden. Like Van Orden, though, Latané liked to party into the night with a drink in his hand, arguing about ideas. He liked it so much, in fact, that he had converted his massive summer house on the beach in Nags Head, North Carolina, into a conference center, to which he would invite diverse groups of researchers to get together for weeklong sessions talking about ideas and drinking into the night. Latané came from a wealthy family and went on to become one of the world's most influential psychologists, but he nevertheless earned a reputation as something of an intellectual troublemaker. A physics major before switching to psychology, Latané liked to shake up social psychology by bringing in radical new ideas from mathematics and other sciences. In the 1990s, he was, like Van Orden, talking enthusiastically about dynamical systems theory.

Latané had begun using ideas from dynamical systems theory to explain the spread of social influence in crowds, to understand sudden flips in political attitudes, and to elucidate how cultural groups come to share whole sets of apparently random attitudes and behaviors (how, for example, some large groups of white Americans came to wear John Deere caps, listen to Hank Williams, eat grits, get married in Baptist churches, and say “y'all” and “pardon me, ma'am?” while others came to wear Garrison belts and leather jackets, listen to Dion and the Belmonts, eat salami heroes, get married in Catholic churches, and said “youse guys” and “hah?”). As it turns out, Latané's research demonstrated why my parents were right that the crowd you are in really matters.

I once saw a cartoon depicting a tough-looking teenage boy in a leather jacket surrounded by a group of intellectual nerds dressed in jackets and ties, the sort of brainy kids I met during my brief tenure at Regis. The tough kid is trembling with fear as the nerds taunt him with a volley of questions like “C'mon, Bruno, what's the Pythagorean theorem?” “Define ‘arcane,' Mr. Wise Guy!” “What's Newton's second law, Bruno?” When people like Van Orden and Latané started tossing out ideas about dynamical systems theory, I felt a bit like the ignorant leather-jacketed punk in that cartoon.

Whenever Van Orden started ranting about “dynamical systems,” he would spew out lots of other scary-sounding terms, like “chaotic attractors,” “cusp catastrophes,” and “fractals.” Although Van Orden left ASU, the university later set up a center devoted to the study of complex dynamical systems, where a group of brilliant biologists, psychologists, economists, and mathematicians now gather to speak that same strange language—using words like “bifurcation” and “hysteresis” in a sentence as easily as if they were talking about oatmeal or bicycles.
You have to be careful about asking for a concrete example, because they may illustrate their point by referring to differential calculus or by writing an equation on the board.

Because Van Orden and Latané were so obviously brilliant and so clearly convinced that the new ideas about complex dynamical systems could help us understand almost anything you could think of, I was inspired to read a few popular books on the topic, such as Mitchell Waldrop's
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
and Fritjof Capra's
Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems.
I began to see how these new ideas could combine with concepts I was already using—from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science—to provide a whole new understanding not only of how the mind works but also of how the simple selfish rules inside our individual heads combine to make families, businesses, governments, and whole societies work.

I am not going to launch into a textbook-style chapter on cusp catastrophes and chaotic attractors. To be honest, I still speak that language like I speak Italian or Spanish, enough to communicate with a five-year-old child who is patient enough to speak very slowly to me. So I only want to talk, at a kindergarten level, about three ideas that are central to this way of thinking, and about how these grand-scale ideas connect with the simple selfish biases I've been talking about in most of this book.

Important Idea Number 1 is
multidirectional causality
, the idea that causes and effects are tough to tease apart in nature because an effect can turn around and alter the thing that caused it. Here's a simple example. If you had a hidden video camera in my house you could occasionally catch me saying to my five-year-old son, “Liam! Stop whining at me and just put on your jacket, or you'll be late for school!” My voice at these times is stern and loud, intended to cause him to stop yelling about a missing Lego part and hustle out the door. But such attempts at influence frequently backfire, causing Liam to yell
even louder and to redouble his efforts to influence me in his preferred direction. If I'm in an especially big rush to get him out of the house, I may respond by raising my volume and sternness level another notch. That is likely to prompt him to scream even louder and tell me to shut up, which earns him a time-out, and consequently makes us even later. All this loud talk may bring my wife into the action, as she attempts to bring peace, but she may find her efforts rewarded with each of us now loudly resisting her.

As it turns out, all social life is like this; instead of unidirectional causality, we have complex multidirectional influences. We try to exert influence on our family members, neighbors, and coworkers, and those family members, neighbors, and coworkers in turn try to influence us back, and they influence one another, which can indirectly affect us in still other ways.

Because there is so much going on out there, with people influencing one another back and forth, and random new people throwing haphazard new vectors into the continuous stream of multidirectional influences, you might expect to find that reality would be mostly a booming and buzzing chaos of disorder. But enter Important Idea Number 2: Systems theorists have discovered that nature is chock-full of
self-organization
. Order often emerges spontaneously out of randomness, maintained not by some overseeing governing authority but by simple, self-centered interactions between local players. Even on the worst of days, Liam and I manage to get on track and out the door and to arrive at his school right along with hundreds of other families, each of whom has managed to settle its own internal conflicts of influence.

Another fascinating conclusion to emerge from research on complex systems gives us Important Idea Number 3: Tremendous complexity can result from just a few interacting variables. As Bert Hölldoebler and E.O. Wilson point out in their book
Superorganism,
for instance, ants have tiny brains with only a small array of simple instinctive decision rules, and yet they are able to construct complex societies
with flexibly organized castes dividing up labor, solving diverse environmental challenges, and constructing architecturally brilliant living structures. And as Sean Carroll points out in his book
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
, genetic researchers have been surprised to find many fewer genes than they expected and to discover that the vast majority of them are shared across species as widely separated as cockroaches and human beings. For example, the very same gene that governs the development of an insect's six legs is the one that governs the development of our four limbs. Slight changes arising from the interaction of different genes, however, have profound and complicated consequences.

While I was hanging out with the greaser crowd, one of the courses I failed to study was algebra, which meant that I did not move on to take calculus. Unfortunately for me, a lot of the folks who are into complexity theory like to express their ideas in equations, to which my brain responds as it does to someone speaking Italian very fast (bringing back images of standing on a train platform in Italy with the speaker rapidly blaring, “
Il treno per Firenze é appena partire al binario due; il treno di Milano é appena arrivare al binario cuatro; il treno di Venezia . . .
”).

But fortunately for me, you can understand the concept of self-organization by looking at pictures, with no equations (and no Italian) necessary. In fact, I was amazed when I discovered that I could use the simple spreadsheet on my computer to make self-organization appear right before my eyes. One night, after hearing Guy Van Orden and my colleague Sandy Braver talk about Latané's research on the spread of influence in groups, I went home and drew a simple matrix on my screen, with a salt-and-pepper configuration like the one on the upper left in
Figure 12.1
.