Chaos Theory Finding New Applications In Life Sciences

Chaos Theory Finding New Applications In Life Sciences Author: NEERAJA SANKARAN, pp.3 Date: August 22,1994 Researchers from a broadening array of life science disciplines say they are finding applications of chaos theory in their work. These scientists point out that it was recognition of the mathematical theory's relevance to their field that prompted psychologists four years ago to form the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology, and a similar realization among life scientists that induced the organization to rename itself the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences last year. And, society president Jeffrey Goldstein says, the list of diverse researchers utilizing the versatile concept is growing. Chaos theory garnered immense publicity last summer, when the bespectacled "chaotician" in Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park (based on Michael Crichton's novel by the same name) apparently predicted that a theme park's dinosaurs, cloned from fossil DNA, would escape from human control. Another well-known image of the theory at work is the Lorenz butterfly--the principle that a butterfly flapping its wings in North America could affect monsoons in China--which was used by meteorologist Edward Lorenz (now a professor, emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to demonstrate the complexity of weather systems. But these popular perceptions of chaos theory may actually have served to give people a misconception of what the theory is really about and what it can be used for, according to Sally Goerner, a psychologist and computer scientist who is director of the Triangle Center for the Study of Complex Systems, a consulting firm in Chapel Hill, N.C. "These examples may give people the idea that there's no use in attempting to use the theory, since there will always be too many factors affecting a system," she says. "But absolute prediction is not what this is about." The real power of chaos theory, she says, lies in its potential as a tool to understanding patterns in various complex biological, psychological, and social phenomena. "Technically," says Jeffrey Goldstein, a professor of organizational psychology at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., "chaos theory describes the behavior of a dynamical [changing] system, which is extremely sensitive to its initial conditions." Thus, he explains, a small change in the initial conditions leads to exponentially larger changes in the outcome, resulting in chaos, or the impression of randomness in a system. "People often confuse chaos with randomness, which is wrong," says Goldstein. "Anything can happen in a random system--it is entirely unpredictable--while a chaotic system is deterministic." "[A chaotic] system is deterministic in that behavior is completely specified at all times and there are no statistical [variables affecting] it," says Mark Shelhamer, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. "Yet its behavior is unpredictable for all practical purposes." But over time, says Goldstein, chaotic systems settle down to following some sort of pattern. These patterns can be discerned by using attractors--pictorial representations of how systems behave over time, obtained by plotting each state against its previous one. "Simple systems have very simple attractors," explains Goldstein. "Take a pendulum, for example. An unpushed pendulum would eventually approach a single point--hence referred to as having a point attractor--and a regularly oscillating one would settle down to an elliptical pattern. "A chaotic system has a far more complicated attractor, but on closer observation you can see that it starts to follow some sort of pattern over time," Goldstein says. "At no instant will the system ever go to a previous state, but it can get infinitesimally close." "Science is about looking for regularities or patterns in nature," says Gary Burlingame, a group psychotherapist and researcher at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah. "A chaotic system follows a nonrepeating, yet self-similar, recognizable pattern." Goerner agrees. "Chaos theory is actually the study of organization, structures, and patterns," she says, "and these are what the life sciences are all about. Psychology, for instance, has always been a study of patterns. Finally we are getting the mathematical tools to meet the conceptual complexity of our systems." Simply stated, chaos theory says that in a changing system, a small difference will be magnified exponentially over time. While exact outcomes are unpredictable, discern- able patterns emerge that help in understanding how varying conditions affect a system. Life scientists are finding the concept particularly useful in analyzing dynamical systems that characterize their work. The society was first established four years ago in San Francisco by a group of 40 scientists--primarily psychologists, along with some computer scientists and mathematicians. These individuals were interested in applying the principles of the theory in complex psychological and social systems. "Initially, mathematical psychologists were interested in chaos as a supplement to the statistical tools they used in their analyses," says Goldstein, a professor of organizational psychology at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., who is applying the principles of chaos in studying theories of organization changes. But as the theory itself was developed further, he says, many psychologists began to realize its power as an analytical tool in its own right, because of its applicability to understanding systems that are not subject to statistical rules. Meanwhile, according to Mark Shelhamer, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, this realization of chaos theory's utility has begun to carry over to researchers in other fields where complex systems abound. "Ever since [James] Gleick wrote his book [Chaos, New York, Penguin Books, 1987], describing the rise of this `new' field, everyone has been trying to find chaotic theory in his or her favorite system," Shelhamer says. "We were no exception." Shelhamer's work involves looking for chaotic patterns in reflexive eye movements. "The society began to attract these people, since there was no place for such a mix of people to meet and discuss these new methods," says Goldstein. This influx--the group now boasts more than 300 members from 10 countries--caused the Amity Harbor, N.Y.-based society to officially change its name last year to include the life sciences, Goldstein says. The society has attracted representatives from disciplines as diverse as neuroscience, physiology, economics, and philosophy--more even than the current name suggests. This expansion and diversification, says past president Sally Goerner, director of the Triangle Center for the Study of Complex Systems, a consulting firm in Chapel Hill, N.C., represents a "vindication of the life sciences and a reconciliation with physics." As Goerner, who has graduate degrees in both computer science and psychology, explains, "The deterministic principles of classical physics, which set the image of what science is 400 years ago, worked fine as long as they were applied to simple phenomena. "The life sciences were regarded almost as a second-class science [by the physical scientists] because they could not be made to fit within [deterministic] rules." Chaos theory, she says, is changing all that by providing life scientists with the "mathematical tools to meet the conceptual complexity" of their work. "The rest of the scientific community has been viewing this work with a `wait-and-see' sort of attitude," says Goldstein. "Only now are we starting to get the means to prove the validity of these new tools." Based on the papers and talks presented at the group's most recent annual meeting (held this year in June at Johns Hopkins) the society has put together a book, titled Chaos Psychology: A Reader, to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. of Hillsdale, N.J., and scheduled for release in spring 1995. "This is the beginning of what we hope will be a series on the subject," says Goldstein, adding that the society has already begun collecting articles for a second volume. The group is also developing an electronic journal, which it hopes to launch sometime this winter. "It is only now that we have some of the computational and analytical tools to effectively explore chaotic behaviors in actual data from experiments," says Shelhamer. "The theory is giving us the power to ask questions about systems in a way we have not been able to so far. "For example, in my work, if the eye movements do appear deterministic rather than random, we can ask if the nervous system deliberately introduces the variability [chaos] and why," he says. "Is a chaotic system more flexible and adaptable than one with less variability?" Gary Burlingame, a group psychotherapist and researcher at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah, explains the utility of chaos in his work: "Using the data from psychotherapy sessions, we can try and see if a chaos-like pattern emerges. While I will never be able to predict what Johnny is going to do at 5 P.M. tomorrow, we can use the theory to determine a fundamental global pattern of what happens in the sessions, and relate events to positive or negative effects on the group as a whole." The society's annual conference reflected the diversity of applications of chaos theory. Paul Rapp, a physiologist from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, discussed the evidence for chaos in the central nervous system of humans, while two materials scientists from the Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama attempted to identify chaotic behavior in warfare systems. Still others discussed the theory's applicability in creativity, economics, psychotherapy, and psychopathology. For more information about the society, contact: The Society of Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, 29 Hayes Rd., Amity Harbor, N.Y. 11701; (516) 789-4145. E-mail: goldstein@auvax1.adelphi.edu.

Chaos Theory Finding New Applications In Life Sciences

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