Is simple best?

It’s interesting that we tend to see everything outside ourselves as simple. We love and even believe in single factor explanations. We like to think we can cure a disease by a single drug or modify a single gene to fix a genetic abnormality. We can fix obesity by making all children eat an orange a day. We can solve global warming problems by covering the world‘s oceans with a snow of expanded polystyrene. Not only do we focus on single factors, but we like to apply our single solutions everywhere. The more the solution is used the more right it must be.

I guess our single factor minds are a consequence of the way we develop through childhood and our competitive educational system. The better we are at screening information, classifying it quickly into categories defined by a dominant or average feature and rejecting outliers, the more successful we are in our human race. We learn to handle our problems in the same way, typing them mentally then tagging the type with a pertinent solution. This is a much faster and less demanding route to answers than dealing with items as unique. It does mean that we miss many of the more complex answers that are multi-factorial and the answers that are shouting at us from the few outliers that we miss in our haste to average and categorise. These might lead to longer-lasting answers that accept the complexity of living systems.

I had discovered ecology. I had learnt that every bit of scrub is unique. It might have a dominant character shared with other bits of bush, but in detail it would be different. It might be different in its composition, it might be different in the timing of the components doing their thing, or it might be different in the degree of dominance achieved by a component at that time or lots of other things. Generally though, I could be fairly certain it had taken a long time to get to that point and in another year it would have changed fractionally to another point. If the trees were chopped down, it would change rather more quickly; components would disappear because they couldn’t handle the cold in winter or the sun exposure in summer, and other species , possibly introduced weeds like pretty fireweed or thistles, would temporarily become dominant. It would still be scrub, but different scrub.