Currently I am reading Carl Zimmer’s book, just out, titled Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life. Nearly twenty years ago I read George Gilder’s then best seller of the same main title: Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology (1990). Both books are about how micro pieces make things happen.
The premise of this blog and generally of my writing is that the Net is a swamp filled with the gold which will cause global enlightenment as the 21st century rolls on. Both Gilder’s and Zimmer’s Microcosms describe the sort of swamp where tiny pieces interact to cause it all. In the golden swamp, gold too is micro. Take this sample (page 43) from Zimmer:
How does E. coli’s metabolism manage to stay so supple when it is made up of hundreds of chemical reactions? With thousands of possible pathways it could choose from, why does it choose among the best few? Why doesn’t the whole system simply crash? Part of the solution lies in the shape of the network itself, the very layout of the labyrinth.
How does the massive heap of information we call Wikipedia emit supple knowledge. With millions of of possible paths to webpages to choose among why does Google choose to place the best few at the top? Why does the chaos of content connections online make sense emerge instead of just crashing?
There are big answers for understanding the future of learning in two principles at work here.
First: Yes, the Net is a content microcosm — what happens emerges from of cosmos of tiny pieces.
Second: That cosmos is a network. Zimmer writes (page 42): “In neither case does robustness come from some all-knowing consciousness. It emerges from the network itself.”
As Gilder has done in the past, Zimmer exercises our thinking for getting our heads around online education. We need to know we fail when we impose some all-knowning education practice from the analog world. Letting E. coli show us the robustness, flexibility, and versatility of micro bits in the action of life suggests how we might entice knowledge to emerge from the content of the Net.
