Representation of fitness landscapes

Summary

Introduction

• The rules of chess allow a vast number of moves to be performed, with many different selections at each instance of the game, in an attempt to checkmate the opponent's king.  The problem of finding a successful path to this goal, even when achieved, is only verified by repetition of the actual path by both players, making master-chess an exponentially-complete problem.  The
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolutionary mechanism explores this vast environment, recording reachable aspects schematically and
  The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment. 
  
  learning from paths that resulted in a win. 
  
• Knowledge imparted by coaching encourages effective practice, shaping the mind with reinforcement refers to lasting changes to the brain that occur throughout the life span of the organism.  Many aspects of the brain can be altered into adulthood.  Almost anything in the nervous system can change in response to sustained stimulus.  And in a different environment the changes will often reverse.  The changes include:
  • The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals
  • Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses.  Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA.  NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism.  LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse. 
    
  • The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite.  Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect. 
    
  • Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.  
  • Sustained stress promotes:
    
  • Hippocampal & frontal cortex  LTD & suppresses LTP.  Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density. 
    
  • Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning.  It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA. 
    
  • Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF. 
    
  • The axon's conditions for
    
  • Initiating an action potential. 
    
  • Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours. 
    
  • Duration of a neuron's refractory period.  Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours. 
    
  • Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
  • Synapses being created or destroyed.  Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms.  The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation.  When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear. 
    
  • Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body. 
    
  • Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex. 
    
  • Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity.  Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet. 
    
  • Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development.  Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.  
  of salient neural circuit, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions.  In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional.  He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:
  • Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states. 
    
  based representations of the schematic recipes and associated high priority games.  A current grandmaster will have represented and modeled:
  
• The recorded history of play.  This includes:
  
• Early Italian style attacks which depended for niche capture on poor understanding of defense, through
  
• Improved defense,
  
• Control and leverage of the center,
  
• Rapid development - where each piece should be optimally placed to provide constraints while being touched only once,
  
• Leverage of pawn structures,
  
• Indirect constraints on the center, and
  
• Dynamic speed based strategies.  
• The strategic consequences of following a particular path.  The open Sicilian, illustrated by this famous Dragon schema, leaves white with a weak e4 pawn that will demand defense and shape black's indirect and direct attacks. 
  
• The fitness is, according to Dawkins, a suitcase word with at least five meanings in biology:
  1. Darwin and Wallace thought in terms of the capacity to survive and reproduce, but they were considering discrete aspects such as chewing grass - where hard enamel would improve the relative fitness. 
     
  2. Population geneticists: Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J.B.S. Haldane; consider selection at a locus where for a genotype: green eyes vs blue eyes; one with higher fitness can be identified from genotypic frequencies and gene frequencies, with all other variations averaged out. 
     
  3. Whole organism 'integrated' fitness.  Dawkins notes there is only ever one instance of a specific organism.  Being unique, comparing the relative success of its offspring makes little sense.  Over a huge number of generations the individual is likely to have provided a contribution to everyone in the pool or no one. 
     
  4. Inclusive fitness, where according to Hamilton, fitness depends on an organism's actions or effects on its children or its relative's children, a model where natural selection favors organs and behaviors that cause the individual's genes to be passed on.  It is easy to mistakenly count an offspring in multiple relative's fitness assessments. 
     
  5. Personal fitness represents the effects a person's relatives have on the individual's fitness [3].  When interpreted correctly fitness [4] and fitness [5] are the same. 
     
  generated by a specific move.  
• Potential adaptations in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage.  Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents.  Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces.  For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery.  He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's.  When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward.  Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas.  The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness';  In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary. 
  that a specific niche enables. 
  
• The schematic representations are recorded in books, organized around multiply
  This page discusses the tagging of signals in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Tagged signals can be used to control filtering of an event stream.  Examples of CAS filters are reviewed. 
  
  tagged sequences: French, King's Indian, Ruy Lopez, Sicilian (Najdorf, Scheveningen) etc...  The non-ergodic schematic database includes prized creative sequences representing paths to notable wins: Fischer's, as white, Najdorf Sozin 8 f4 - expanding its perceived fitness, and his subsequent, as black, ... 14 h5 - that undermined this assessment; and important losses and
  This page discusses the methods of avoiding traps.  Genetic selection and learning to avoid traps are reviewed. 
  
  traps to be avoided.  The understanding of the stream of leveraged niche capture then encourages other knowledgeable players to review niches that may be reached by legitimate, short additional schematic sequences and analogous series of moves of pieces.  Often the exploration depends on group interest, with masters noting that investigation of some niche areas was abandoned when they became unfashionable.  Although the recorded analyses, advice and schemata are helpful, to utilize them over the board the details must be learned, which involves considerable practice. 
  
• Through practice and actual competition, the
  Consciousness is no longer mysterious.  In this page we use complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to describe the high-level architecture of consciousness, linking sensory networks, low level feelings and genetically conserved and deployed neural structures into a high level scheduler.  Consciousness is evolution's solution to the complex problems of effective, emergent, multi-cellular perception based strategy.  Constrained by emergence and needing to avoid the epistemological problem of starting with a blank slate with every birth, evolution was limited in its options. 
  
  We explain how survival value allows evolution to leverage available tools: sensors, agent relative position, models, perception & representation; to solve the problem of mobile agents responding effectively to their own state and proximate environment.  Evolution did this by providing a genetically constructed framework that can develop into a conscious CAS. 
  
  And we discuss the implications with regard to artificial intelligence, sentient robots, augmented intelligence, and aspects of philosophy. 
  
  conscious representation of chess games will become associated with: visual signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  , feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits.  These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula.  Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience.  Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism.  They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles.  Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience.  Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints.  Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  generated over-the-board and especially in experiencing wins and losses, and logical thoughts - of the DLPFC is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is:
  • At the heart of decision making - highly rational, unsentimental 
  • A major agent of working memory
    
  • The most recently evolved part of the prefrontal cortex.  
  • Mainly interconnected with other parts of the cortex. 
    
  • Must be inhibited or it constrains right brain creativity. 
    
  , integrated through memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory.  This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus.  This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP.  The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected.   with the adaptive unconscious is Timothy Wilson's idea of a set of high-level cognitive processes, which interpret 'information' quickly without conscious awareness.  It supports: decision making - where it's operation suggests prior gathering of details consciously and then allowing time, including sleeping, for the adaptive unconscious to generate a preference, although it is quick to categorize and rigid and may be overruled by the slower acting consciousness; Kahneman views adaptive unconscious decision making as part of fast thinking. 
  .  
• Involvement of human consciousness allows application of the 'cognitive niche is Tooby & DeVore's theory that reflects a flexible competitive strategy, described by Steven Pinker, which leverages the power and flexibility of intelligence to defeat the capabilities of genetically evolved specialists focused on specific niches.  ' of
  Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented.  Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  
  good ideas to the current game flow. 
  
• Replication of the basic process of developing a chess player results in robustness, and parallel exploration of the popular niches, with the support of
  This page discusses the benefits of geographic clusters of agents and resources at the center of a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  geographic clustering of these agents. 
  

• Beginners have no schematic representation of the chess CAS so they can only
  Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of  nervous systems and feelings.  These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. 
  
  Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. 
  
  Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness.  His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.'  He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism.  And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. 
  
  Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis.  He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives.  But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
  

  • Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. 
    
  • Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. 

  
  
  call upon their
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution based genetic strategies and cultural is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
    
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
    
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
    
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
    
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
    
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
    
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  memetic strategies.  It is typical that they do not construct a SuperOrganism from the nascent army of pieces. 
  
• Over
  Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
  Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  

  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
    
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
    
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
    
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
    
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

  Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  

  • Our familiar time emerges
    
  • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    
  • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
    
  • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    
  • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    
  • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

  
  
  time, iterative chess play can build experience over-the-board.  This will capture strategies and tactics are goals and actions which respond to the actions of the enemy in a combat, rather than focusing on ones own strategic direction. 
  that the player has found help increase the odds of winning.  These ideas are built on the beginner's approach modified by experience.  Coordination of the pieces will be rewarded, but without a schematic opening approach, each game will be a new exploration of 'the board'. 
  
• Reading about master chess games, talking with other players, and especially coaching by experts can transform the mental models that the chess player uses to analyze and decide on moves over-the-board.  A shift in approach, to matching move flows with schematic representations of these becomes clear which, changes the players perception of the available niches and how they operate. 
  
• Master play, supported by huge amounts of coached practice, and emotional are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  clarity and drive from winning regularly, adds highly schematic operations during the opening and end-game.  This strategy can be leveraged by a master with a clear perception of the current environment over-the-board and the likely fitness is, according to Dawkins, a suitcase word with at least five meanings in biology:
  1. Darwin and Wallace thought in terms of the capacity to survive and reproduce, but they were considering discrete aspects such as chewing grass - where hard enamel would improve the relative fitness. 
     
  2. Population geneticists: Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J.B.S. Haldane; consider selection at a locus where for a genotype: green eyes vs blue eyes; one with higher fitness can be identified from genotypic frequencies and gene frequencies, with all other variations averaged out. 
     
  3. Whole organism 'integrated' fitness.  Dawkins notes there is only ever one instance of a specific organism.  Being unique, comparing the relative success of its offspring makes little sense.  Over a huge number of generations the individual is likely to have provided a contribution to everyone in the pool or no one. 
     
  4. Inclusive fitness, where according to Hamilton, fitness depends on an organism's actions or effects on its children or its relative's children, a model where natural selection favors organs and behaviors that cause the individual's genes to be passed on.  It is easy to mistakenly count an offspring in multiple relative's fitness assessments. 
     
  5. Personal fitness represents the effects a person's relatives have on the individual's fitness [3].  When interpreted correctly fitness [4] and fitness [5] are the same. 
     
  of each path they can select.  The middle-game occurs when their schematic overlays no longer represent the environment.  The master must now leverage the strengths they have gained to support the tactical are goals and actions which respond to the actions of the enemy in a combat, rather than focusing on ones own strategic direction. 
  operations they employ. 
  

• AT&T's
  A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).  Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks:
  

  1. The evolving global scientific network. 
     
  2. The Bell telephone network.  And
     
  3. The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. 

  Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. 
  They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. 
  Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. 
  
  
  Bell Labs encouraged schematic research activities.  Toyota developed the approach in aligning their quality and manufacturing strategies using
  This presentation reviews just-in-time manufacturing with analysis based on complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  JIT and
  This page reviews the strategy of architecting an end-to-end solution in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its costs and benefits are discussed. 
  
  end-to-end architecture. 
• Geisinger leveraged the approach in their
  Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC.  After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network.  And they explain:
  

  • How they planned out the transformation,
    
  • Leveraging an effective governance structure,
    
  • Using a strategy to gain buy in,
    
  • Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. 
  • Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians.  
  • Geisinger's leverage of biologics.  
  • Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.  
  • Where Geisinger is headed next. 
    

  
  Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  
  redesign of the
  The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  The network:
  

  • Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without.  The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network.  
  • The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters;
    
  • Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse;
  • Globalization connects disparate environments in a network.  At the edges, humans are drastically altering the biosphere.  That is reducing the proximate natural environment's connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and far less diverse.  This disconnects predators from their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that transform the local parasite network and their reservoir and amplifier hosts.  The situation is setup so that man is introduced to spillover from the local parasites' hosts.  Occasionally, but increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming broadly infected.  The evolved specialization of the immune system to the proximate environment during development becomes undermined as the environment transforms. 
    
  • Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies.  This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. 
    
  • Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. 
    
  • Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.  
  • Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to.  As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems.  The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. 
    
  • Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is:
  • Costly and inefficient
  • Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies.  
  • Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems.  
  • Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the:
  • Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to
    
  • Physician networks
  • Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation
    
  • Hospital clinical supply and food production networks
    
  • Medical school and academic research network and NIH
    
  • Global transportation network 
  • Public health networks 
  • Health care IT supply network
    
  healthcare CAS provider-insurer business model. 
  

• Prokaryotes, a single cell system with two main types: (1) Archaea, and (2) Eubacteria.  Prokaryotes have their own DNA and infrastructure within a single enclosure.  They are biochemically very versatile: Photosynthesis -> Electron transport & phosphorylation, Enzymatic regulation and catalysis of chemical reactions, Catabolize -> phosphate bond energy, ATP cycle, glycolysis, TCA cycle, Electron transports, oxidative phosphorylation, oxidation of fatty acids, oxidative degradation of amino acids; Biosynthesis & utilization of phosphate bond energy -> carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids, nucleotides, muscle & motile structures; membrane barriers & active transports, hormones; Replication, Transcription, Translation, Regulation of gene expression; self-assembly; They utilize cell membrane receptors and signalling to support symbiotic cooperation with other cellular entities, including: in the microbiome, and as chloroplasts and mitochondria within eukaryotic cells. 
  respond to stress by increasing the mutation rate. 
  
• Human adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged, encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  ensures increased risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring.  It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system.  As such it is different from uncertainty. 
  taking, exploration of alternative strategies, switching groups, challenging leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group.  Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership.  Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes.  John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 
  . 
  

• Increasing the carrying capacity of the local
  The complex adaptive system (CAS) nature of a value delivery system is first introduced.  It's a network of agents acting as relays. 
  
  The critical nature of hub agents and the difficulty of altering an aligned network is reviewed. 
  
  The nature of and exceptional opportunities created by platforms are discussed. 
  
  Finally an example of aligning a VDS is presented. 
  
  environment,
  
• Providing opportunities to
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  control flows and capture and leverage outsize access to resources,
  
• Enabling
  This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Small world and scale free networks are considered. 
  
  network effects, including extended
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  memetic mixing, added opportunities for
  Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
  The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
  
  agents in adjacent regions and
  This page discusses the benefits of geographic clusters of agents and resources at the center of a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  geographic clustering, 
  
• Competitive interactions pressuring the combatants to
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  respond schematically to each other's adaptations.  
• Recycling of resources and agents into adjacent niches. 
  

Evolving with an adapted environment

• The amino acid variable side chain introduces variations in polarity, charge (acid and base), shape and size. 
• The peptide bond links two amino-acids together by their C and N terminals.  It orients the side chains.  The resulting polymer has vast degrees of freedom that become limited by the specific side chains that are deployed.  So the DNA sequence mapped through the genetic code is able to generate a vast variety of chemically different poly peptides.  Evolutionarily retained variants include alpha helix, beta sheets, beta bends and many active site structures which in aggregate have proven to be excellent structural and enzymatic building blocks. 
  introduces the planar trans configuration, and main chain hydrogen bonding, there are different types of chemical bonds.  Ionic bonds stabilize two oppositely charged ionized atoms when the negative atom gives up an electron to the positively charged atom.  Covalent bonds stabilize the two reactants when they adopt a more stable structure with electrons shared between them.  Hydrogen bonds stabilize charged groups when they are surrounded by water molecules.  In Copycat codelets can bond two Workspace objects together.  In the Smiley implementation a bondbuilder adds a bonding descriptor to one of the objects bonding it to the other.   to enable alpha helices provides a structural building block (a helical tube) that can be conserved and used by natural selection.  , parallel and anti-parallel beta sheet provides a structural building block (a sheet with consistent electrical and physical properties) that can be conserved and used by natural selection.  , and beta bends, provides a structural building block (a turn) that can be conserved and used by natural selection. 
  , and exclusion of water molecules, multiple atoms bonded together.  The physical and chemical phenomena associated with the molecule such as charge, size, shape, and potential energy reflect the constituent atoms, the types of bonds between them and the topology of the bonding.  Charged molecules dissolve in aqueous solutions (water).  Uncharged molecules dissolve in lipid bilayers.   from otherwise non-polar environments. 

Strategic clustering

Politics, Economics & Evolutionary Psychology

Business Physics Nature and nurture drive the business eco-system Human nature Emerging structure and dynamic forces of adaptation

integrating quality appropriate for each market

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