"NOTHING WILL COME OF NOTHING"
This quotation of King Lear telescopes into a single utterance a whole series of medieval and more modern wise saws. These include:
a. The law of the conversation of matter and its converse, that no new matter can be expected to make an appearance in the new laboratory. (Lucretius said "Nothing can ever be created out of nothing by divine power.")
b. The law of the conservation of energy and its converse, that no new energy can be expected in the laboratory.
c. The principle demonstrated by Pasteur, that no new living matter can be expected to appear in the laboratory.
d. The principle that no new order or pattern can be created without information.
Of all these and other similar negative statements, it may be said that they are rules for expectation rather than laws of nature. They are so nearly true that all exceptions are of extreme interest.
What is especially interesting is hidden in the relations between these profound negations. For example, we know today that between the conservation of energy and the conservation of matter, there is a bridge whereby each of these negations is itself negated by an interchange of matter into energy and, presumably, of energy into matter.
In the present connection, however, it is the last of the series that is of chief interest, the proposition that in the realms of communication, organization, thought, learning, and evolution, "nothing will come of nothing" without information.
This law differs from the conservative laws of energy and mass in that it contains no clause to deny the destruction and loss of information, pattern, or negative entropy. Alas - but also be glad of it - pattern, and/or information is all too easily eaten up by the random. The messages and guidelines for order exist only, as it were, in sand or are written on the surface of waters. Almost any disturbance, even mere Brownian movement, will destroy them. Information can be forgotten or blurred. The code books can be lost.
The messages cease to be messages when nobody can read them. Without a Rosetta stone, we would know nothing of all that was written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. They would be only elegant ornaments on papyrus or rock. To be meaningful - even to be recognized as pattern - every regularity must meet with complementary regularities, perhaps skills, and these skills are as evanescent as the patterns themselves. They, too, are written on sand or the surface of waters.
The genesis of the skill to respond to the message is the obverse, the other side of the process of evolution. It is coevolution (Stochastic system of evolutionary change in which two or more species interact in such a way that changes in the species A prepare the ground for natural selection of changes in species B. Subsequent changes in species B, in turn, pave the way for the selection of the most similar changes in the species A.)).
Paradoxically, the deep partial truth that "nothing will come of nothing" in the world of information and organization encounters an interesting contradiction in the circumstance that zero, the complete absence of any indicative event, can be a message. The larval tick climbs a tree and waits on some outer twig. If he smells sweat, he falls, perhaps landing on a mammal. But if he smells no sweat after some weeks, he falls and goes to climb another tree.
The letter that you do not write, the apology you do not offer, the food that you do not put out for the cat - all these can be sufficient and effective messages because zero, in context, can be meaningful; and it is the recipient of the message who creates the context. This power to create context is the recipient's skill; to acquire which is his half of the coevolution mentioned above. He or she must acquire that skill by learning or by lucky mutation, that is, by a successful raid on the random. The recipient must be, in some sense, ready for the appropriate discovery when it comes.
Thus, the converse of the proposition that "nothing will come of nothing" without information is conceivably possible with stochastic process. Readiness can serve to select components of the random which thereby become new information. But always a supply of random appearances must be available from which new information can be made.
This circumstance splits the entire field of organization, evolution, maturation and learning, into two separate realms, of which one is the realm of epigenesis, or embryology, and the other the realm of evolution and learning.
Epigenesis is the word preferred by C.H. Waddington for his central field of interest, whose old name was embryology. It stresses the fact that every embryological step is an act of becoming (Greek genesis) which must be built upon (Greek epi) the immediate status quo ante. Characteristically, Waddinton was contemptuous of conventional information theory, which allowed nothing, as he saw it, for the "new" information he felt was generated at each stage of epigenesis. Indeed, according to conventional theory, there is no new information in this case.
Ideally, epigenesis should resemble the development of a complex tautology (Set of propositions related to the validity of the "links" can not be doubted. The truth of propositions but is not required. Example: Euclidean geometry.) in which nothing is added after the axioms and definitions have been laid down. The Pythagorean theorem is implicit (i.e., already folded into) Euclid's axioms, definitions, and postulates. All that is required is its unfolding and, for human beings, some knowledge of the order of steps to be taken. This latter species of information will become necessary only when Euclid's tautology is modeled in words and symbols sequentially arranged on paper or in time. In the ideal tautology, there is no time, no unfolding, and no argument. What is implicit is there, but, of course, not located in space.
In contrast with epigenesis and tautology, which constitute the worlds of replication, there is the whole realm of creativity, art, learning, and evolution, in which the ongoing processes of change feed on the random. The essence of epigenesis is predictable repetition; the essence of learning and evolution is exploration and change.
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents; but the attempt always and inevitably fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not to DNA. The process of transmission of culture is a sort of hybrid or mix-up of the two realms. It must attempt to use the phenomena of learning of the purpose of replication because what the parents have was learned by them. If the offspring miraculously had the DNA that would give them the parental skills, those skills would be different and perhaps nonviable.
It is interesting that between the two worlds is the cultural phenomenon of explanation - the mapping onto (I use the phrase, to map onto, for the following reasons: All description, explanation, or representation is necessarily in some sense a mapping of derivatives from the phenomena to be described onto some surface of matrix or system or coordinates. In the case of an actual map, the receiving matrix is commonly a flat sheet of paper of finite extent, and difficulties occur when that which is to be mapped is too big or, for example, spherical. Other difficulties would be generate if the receiving matrix were the surface of a torus (doughnut) or if it were a discontinuous lineal sequence of points. Every receiving matrix, even a language or a tautological network of propositions, will have its formal characteristics which will in principle be distortive of the phenomena to be mapped ontoit. The universe was, perhaps, designed by Procrustes, that sinister character of Greek mythology in whose inn every traveler had to fit the bed on pain of amputation or elongation of the legs.) tautology of unfamiliar sequences of events.
Finally, it will be noted that the realms of epigenesis and of evolution are, at a deeper level, typified in the twin paradigms of the second law of thermodynamics. (1) that the random workings of probability will always eat up order, pattern, and negative entropy but (2) that for the creation of new order, the workings of the random, the plethora of uncommitted alternatives (entropy) is necessary. It is out of the random that organisms collect new mutations, and it is there that stochastic learning gathers its solutions. Evolution leads to climax: ecological saturation of all the possibilities of differentiation. Learning leads to the overpacked mind. By return to the unlearned and mass-produced egg, the ongoing species again and again clears its memory banks to be ready for the new.
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