The Coordination of Life

J. A. SCOTT KELSO – “The coordination of living things is one of the great mysteries in the science of life. Coordination is in us and all around us. It is everywhere we look, from the coordination among the genes that make us who we are and what we become, to the remarkable coordination among the nerve cells of the brain that allows us to perceive the world, to learn and to remember, to decide and to act. And then there is the coordination among people, working together toward a common goal. All is coordinated, at all levels at all scales… All is a dance. But how is it done? The new science of coordination is called coordination dynamics. The basic idea is that the coordination of life is an emergent, self-organized process in which all the many and diverse parts of the system come together and form coherent patterns of behavior. Coordination is dynamic: it evolves and changes in space and in time. These patterns of coordination are always meaningful patterns, but they are transient and fleeting, never staying still for too long…making them difficult to comprehend…

The great physicist Isaac Newton gave us the laws of motion for inanimate, nonliving things, the motions of planets and particles. Coordination dynamics seeks the laws and rules of the purposeful coordination displayed by living creatures at all scales—from the lowly worm in the ground to the graceful motion of the ballerina. Where better than to look for these laws in the coordination of human movement! There we see all the signatures of self-organization and pattern formation. As stability gives way to instability, as a threshold is crossed, new patterns emerge from the old. The old pattern that once was now relaxes more and more slowly and fluctuations begin to grow larger and larger, anticipating the new…And then as we learn, and grow old, the patterns stabilize in memory….the dancer and the dance are bound forever. But this is no rigid dance, no fixed arrangement of the parts, no machine. The parts, the players express themselves, their own autonomy even as they dance together. How can this be? How can they be both separate but together? How can this be? How can this be? “