"I know," I smiled. "It also explains why natural systems are so insanely parsimonious. If surprise represents inefficiency, and the system is designed to minimize surprise, then it's designed to minimize inefficiency. Actually, do you remember back to earlier in the night, when I read you that New York Times article about biological parsimony? I'll read it again."
Photoreceptors exemplify the principle of optimization, an idea, gaining ever wider traction among researchers, that certain key features of the natural world have been honed by evolution to the highest possible peaks of performance, the legal limits of what Newton, Maxwell, Pauli, Planck et Albert will allow. Scientists have identified and mathematically anatomized an array of cases where optimization has left its fastidious mark, among them the superb efficiency with which bacterial cells will close in on a food source; the precision response in a fruit fly embryo to contouring molecules that help distinguish tail from head; and the way a shark can find its prey by measuring micro-fluxes of electricity in the water a tremulous millionth of a volt strong — which, as Douglas Fields observed in Scientific American, is like detecting an electrical field generated by a standard AA battery "with one pole dipped in the Long Island Sound and the other pole in waters of Jacksonville, Fla." In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants.
The New York Times
"This is exactly what surprise-minimization does," I said. "If every Markov blanket in the system is minimizing surprise, then everything will fit its environment like a puddle of water fits in a pothole. If you change the size of the hole, the water will flow via the path of least resistance to fill up the new space."
"I don't get it," Zac said. "Can you draw it?"
"Sure. The ecosystem has its own Markov blanket, and it sits within the universe's Markov blanket."
"Currently, the ecosystem is finely tuned to our universe's physical constraints, which is another way of saying the ecosystem is resisting entropy. If we were to suddenly relocate to another universe with alternate physical constants, surprise would run rampant in the system. The ecosystem has modeled a reality based on alternate laws of physics, so its inaccurate model will inevitably cause part of the ecosystem to entropy and die off. Over time, however, the ecosystem will minimize surprise as it forms an accurate model of its new environment and adapts to it. Of course, this process happens over millions and millions of years. Nature will adapt to the constraints of the system, but it's an incredibly incremental process."
"Why is that?" Zac asked.
