Life is a stubborn and sullen complexity – 06/12/2023 – Suzana Herculano-Houzel

There are some troubles we get into that change our lives for the better. It’s not at all because I needed the mess, since life was perfectly fine without it. The thing is, we’ve inherited a brain that loves having a sore to scratch just because it can dig its nails into the flesh and enjoy, with delight and indecent nods of approval, the feeling of self-conquered relief.

Did the world there need to know how many neurons are in the brains of humans and other animals? They were all fine, thinking that our species was special – but I got into turning brains into soup just to count neurons, which led me to picking fights with specialists of this and that who first warned me that it was obvious that I was wrong, but now they knew since they were little kids that the thing was as I suspected, hence, why the surprise with my findings that humans are just another species of primate?

On the other hand, we do have the largest number of cortical neurons. And? So the first suspicion is that it has something to do with our intelligence. Hence the next predicament, which is not yet today’s: defining intelligence. The story of arriving at this definition I already told here —intelligence is behavioral flexibility—, which gives a lot of satisfaction to this brain here, but leads to another predicament: what is behavior? I came out of it concluding that behavior was any and all observable action, a conclusion that, in turn, only led me to yet another mess, even hairier, this one today. Because if that’s behavior, then a spinning fan has behavior — but it’s not even alive. Can this, Arnaldo, have behavior without having life? Because you’ll see that the ventilator is, yes, alive, and we don’t know it. The answer depends on defining what life is. Just that. That’s just the size of the mess.

Several of us scientists have arrived by different means at a common core definition: life is self-organizing complexity. Beautiful and promising definition—except incomplete, as every mineral aisle in the natural history museums I love to visit wherever I go reminds me.

Because minerals can also be self-assembled. Rough diamonds come to mind, with their octahedral shape when the diamond is pure, and many other regular polyhedrons of geometry exist in nature. They are forms that emerge without anyone commanding or supervising them, just because the atoms that compose them act as units that, under pressure, slide over each other (I’m using poetic license here), fit and accommodate themselves in positions that are stable, since that “getting out” of them takes a lot of energy.

Minerals are lazy that way—everything life isn’t. Because life is also self-organized complexity, but in the messed-up way: stubborn and quarrelsome, which is only stable as long as there is enough flow of energy and matter to “continue” being organized. Needed? No. But she shows up anyway, and the world becomes a more interesting place because of her.

Want to know more? Excellent! This Tuesday (13) is the day of a lecture by the Otavio Frias Filho Chair at USP, on YouTube, and you can learn for free from physicist Bruno Mota how various aspects of life happen without an instruction manual. Enter here!

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