🚀 go-pugleaf

You wrote:

 | I am a high school student doing a project on non-linear dynamic systems
 | and chaos theory. In studying complex (and often non-linear) systems, I
 | couldn�t help but being fascinated by the existence of living organisms. I
 | am yet to finish my high school and I guess I don't know much. However it
 | seems pretty much a miracle to me that life simply came into existence all
 | of a sudden-----and so quickly after earth became comfortable enough for
 | living things to develop. Even more astonishing is that life has a
 | tendency to evolve in the direction towards greater complexity. Here the
 | theory of evolution fails complete, at least to me. In terms of ability
 | to reproduce and surviving in harsh conditions we human loses helplessly
 | to some simple single-cell organisms. Yet the very fact that you are
 | reading this article suggests that there're built-in forces of nature
 | that lead inevitably to the formation of systems of higher organisation
 | and greater complexity. So far I know of no theory that explains
 | satisfactorily this phenomena. And it's my hope that someone in this
 | newsgroup would give me some convincing explanations. Consider how eyes
 | could have formed. Eyes definitely put some organisms at an advantage over
 | others. But I suppose half an eye would not help much at that, what's
 | more, it would be a sheer burden. But the idea that it so happened all of
 | a sudden living organisms acquired fully functional eyes by some
 | accident was too much for me. Since far-from-equilibrium systems has a
 | tendency to go through bifurcations and 'jump' to some other (stable)
 | states, and living organisms are all open systems that are far from
 | equilibrium, I somehow feel that they are related. I am tempted to
 | construct some computational model to simulate living organisms, but I
 | couldn't think of how to start. Right now I'm still doing Lorenz attractor
 | and logistic equations and Henon maps.

Feng (excuse me if I have confused your surname from your personal name; I
never know if English-speaking Chinese are using the European convention or
not):

I am not in that discipline, but I can recommend some technical books to
you. The first one is _Origins of Order_ by Stuart Kaufmann. His view is
that evolution results from autocatalytic processes at a large scale. A
less technical version is to be found in his _At Home in the Universe_ and
a nice summary of his views is in the last section of Depew and Weber's
_Darwinism Evolving_, all of which should be available at a good library or
bookshop.

As to eyes, and the general situation of complex adaptive structures as
they are called, you should first read Richard Dawkins's _Climbing Mount
Improbable_ which is in the shops now in paperback, and then go on to a
proper text on evolution, eg, by Ayala or Ridley. You do not seem to have a
good technical grasp of the subject of biological evolution. Dawkins has
also done a computer simulation of evolution called (IIRC) Tierra, which
can be purchased, but I suspect it won't do what you are interested in.

Finally, and this is perhaps at a tangent to your interests, a model of
evolution as a process of entropy is to be found in DR Brooks and EO
Wiley's _Evolution as Entropy_, 2nd edition 1988.

All these approaches are gaining some ground in the biological community
but there is much skepticism, some referring to it as 'fact-free' science.
I think it is a bit like when Fisher and Chetverikov started population
genetics and the biological community took a long time to catch up. We'll
see.

 | I'd like very much  that someone help me along the way.
 | Please contact me through email at: e904952p@hjc.edu.sg
 | Thank you.
 | And please excuse me of my broken English, it's not my native language and
 | it's taken me two years to get this far as be able to express myself.

There's nothing wrong with your English, and you do better than many native
speakers on t.o...

Hope this helps

-- 
John Wilkins, Head of Communication Services, Walter and Eliza
Hall Institute of Medical Research [Remove .UNSPAM from header address]
<http://www.wehi.edu.au/~wilkins><mailto:wilkins@wehi.edu.au>
It is not enough to succeed. Friends must be seen to have failed. - Capote