This website is concerned with human growth.
It is the continual dance between predictability and unpredictability that allows nature to form its own unique patterns and structures when it comes to growth.
As we know from systems theory, if every living thing was precisely identical, and its behaviour, like a machine, was absolutely predictable, it could never adapt to its environment, so it would die if the environment changed.
I mentioned a murmuration of a flock of birds earlier. To our eyes it is entirely unpredictable, yet it has order, as all the birds turn in unison, at high speed, without (seemingly) getting instructions from a lead bird. Something similar is observed when we look at a shoal of fish. And the same goes for the colony of termites also mentioned earlier. Like the murmuration, it looks chaotic at first glance, but of course it has a very well structured and ordered pattern of behaviour that is necessary for the colony to survive and thrive.
All these examples have an element of unpredictability, but they also have some predictability, which is called self-similarity (which I will be describing in a following post) in their patterns of behaviour. That is, the patterns are similar, and to some extent predictable, but they are never identical.
This has been known by police for approx. 150 years in police and detective work, when it was established that even though all our fingerprints are very alike – they are unique.
In many phenomena in nature, wise, experienced observers will see patterns where others see chaos – or, (in respect of human behaviour), will see order where others see anarchy.
And isn’t it interesting that we use the expression sure that’s human nature to describe the way we typically behave! Human nature is, of course, as unpredictable as nature itself and yet has a kind of order woven into it that the interested onlooker will spot.
For example, a mother will almost always see an order and pattern in the chaotic behaviour of her child. This is because she is so familiar with her that she almost feels part of her, as she was once part of her.