Free The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler Page A

had used different methods to put them together. Mekhos had
assembled his watches bit by bit -- rather like making a mosaic floor
out of small coloured stones. Thus each time when he was disturbed in
his work and had to put down a partly assembled watch, it fell to pieces
and he had to start again from scratch.
     
     
Bios, on the other hand, had designed a method of making watches by
constructing, for a start, subassemblies of about ten components, each of
which held together as an independent unit. Ten of these subassemblies
could then be fitted together into a subsystem of a higher order; and
ten of these subsystems constituted the whole watch. This method proved
to have two immense advantages.
     
     
In the first place, each time there was an interruption or a disturbance,
and Bios had to put down, or even drop, the watch he was working on,
it did not decompose into its elementary bits; instead of starting all
over again, he merely had to reassemble that particular subassembly on
which he was working at the time; so that at worst (if the disturbance
came when he had nearly finished the sub-assembly in hand) he had to
repeat nine assembling operations, and at best none at all. Now it is
easy to show mathematically that if a watch consists of a thousand bits,
and if some disturbance occurs at an average of once in every hundred
assembling operations -- then Mekhos will take four thousand times
longer to assemble a watch than Bios. Instead of a single day, it will
take him eleven years. And if for mechanical bits, we substitute amino
acids, protein molecules, organelles, and so on, the ratio between the
time-scales becomes astronomical; some calculations [3] indicate that
the whole lifetime of the earth would be insufficient for producing even
an amoeba -- unless he becomes converted to Bios' method and proceeds
hierarchically, from simple sub-assemblies to more complex ones. Simon
concludes: 'Complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more
rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms than if there are not. The
resulting complex forms in the former case will be hierarchic. We have
only to turn the argument around to explain the observed predominance
of hierarchies among the complex systems Nature presents to us. Among
possible complex forms, hierarchies are the ones that have the time to
evolve.' [4]
     
     
A second advantage of Bios' method is of course that the finished
product will be incomparably more resistant to damage, and much easier
to maintain, regulate and repair, than Mekhos' unstable mosaic of atomic
bits. We do not know what forms of life have evolved on other planets
in the universe, but we can safely assume that wherever there is life,
it must be hierarchically organised .
     
     
     
Enter Janus
     
     
If we look at any form of social organisation with some degree of
coherence and stability, from insect state to Pentagon, we shall find that
it is hierarchically ordered. The same is true of the structure of living
organisms and their ways of functioning -- from instinctive behaviour to
the sophisticated skills of piano-playing and talking. And it is equally
true of the processes of becoming -- phylogeny, ontogeny, the acquisition
of knowledge. However, if the branching tree is to represent more than
a superficial analogy, there must be certain principles or laws which
apply to all levels of a given hierarchy, and to all the varied types of
hierarchy just mentioned -- in other words, which define the meaning of
'hierarchic order'. In the pages that follow I shall outline several
of these principles. They may at first sight look a little abstract,
yet taken together, they shed a new light on some old problems.
     
     
The first universal characteristic of hierarchies is the relativity, and
indeed ambiguity, of the terms 'part' and 'whole' when applied to any of
the sub-assemblies. Again it is the very obviousness of this feature which
makes us overlook its implications. A 'part', as we generally