Skeletons in the closet

Research from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), demonstrates that complex networks in a variety of domains – biological, technological and social – share the same common underlying skeletal backbone. This fascinating finding has many different applications including understanding disease progression, information dissipation and network optimization in engineering, transportation and electronics. This is further proof that we are entering a regime in which true innovation happens across domains and not within it. Most of the effort currently spent in specialization in medicine, engineering, science and technology are unlikely to result in innovation.

Networks are fundamental – they span every function and every system. From the days of Poincare, over a century ago, it has been postulated that complex outcomes can be achieved by the repetition of standard constructs. The fact that complex networks emanate from the same underlying skeletal systems further reinforce the idea that the universe and everything in it evolve from a few standard templates. Scientific research has been focused on understanding the outcomes and hypothesizing complex theories that accommodate many different observations. In Physics, this has led to the particle zoo – an attempt to explain phenomena by addition rather than by simplification. In Medicine, this has taken the form of treating diseases by inhibiting what may be causing the end outcomes. In Economics, this has led to empiricism in an effort to explain complex behavior and in Engineering, this shows up as incrementalism – an attempt to build on top of the past. Northwestern finding hints that all of these are misguided. What is more important is to understand the templates underlying complex phenomena and not the phenomena itself.

Another important aspect of the finding is that network participants have high consensus on the importance of the links in the system. This also has implications in many different areas including societal and organizational designs. The fact that natural networks exhibit the consensus property universally means that any system designed artificially without such considerations is bound to fail. Highly prescriptive hierarchies, segmentation and segregation, information seclusion and hoarding and other such properties seen commonly in contemporary societies and organizations mean that these systems are not in equilibrium and they will likely break down.

Innovation is a horizontal phenomena. Systems that do not share common features with natural networks are unstable.

(1) Skeleton key, Published: Saturday, June 2, 2012 - 21:32 in Mathematics & Economics. Source: Northwestern University