Fuller writes with a light pen in his classroom at ProtoTista.
He spends nearly every waking hour in the drafty rented warehouse that is ProtoTista, his independent nonprofit science school in Eugene, Oregon. He's the school's dean, instructor, webmaster, AV tech, janitor and bookkeeper. Fuller says he hasn't had a day off—not even holidays or weekends—for nearly a year. "If I'm not sleeping, I'm working on ProtoTista stuff," he says. "There is nothing else in my life at the moment."
Fuller's thin face is furred with bristle and when he smiles, his cheeks rise to meet blue eyes rimmed in faint wrinkles. He has the look of a man used to a good fight. It's a quality he acquired early on, while growing up in rural western Tennessee. Fuller was a skinny red-haired kid and he had to make up in ferocity what he lacked in brawn. That recalcitrance stayed with him, and he still doesn't like to be told what to do.
"I'm probably not cut out to be in mainstream academia," he says. "I'm too much of a rebel. I want to do things my way."
"I'M PROBABLY NOT CUT OUT TO BE IN MAINSTREAM ACADEMIA. I'M TOO MUCH OF A REBEL."A rebel he may be, but the man has earned his stripes in the academic world: a B.S. in biology, an M.S. in biological systematics, an M.S. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution. In addition, Fuller taught biology and math at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for nearly a decade. He left mainstream academia to teach an emerging field called complexity, which he describes as a shift in scientific
thinking "comparable to the Copernican, Newtonian, Darwinian and Einsteinian revolutions combined."
Fuller is not unique in his interest in complexity, but he is on the radical fringe of the scientists who teach it. While the mainstream science world acknowledges the value of complexity as a tool for advancing scientific knowledge, few go so far as to claim it will bring about sweeping global change. Fuller believes complexity has the potential to do just that.
Dr. Jim Schombert, an associate professor of physics at the University of Oregon, is among those who advocate a cautious approach. He thinks that complexity is too new and too undefined to warrant the same academic priority as physics and chemistry. "You lose a lot of the flavor if you jump right into it," he says. "I'm hesitant to [teach] complexity before I teach reductionism."
Schombert also cautions against seeing complexity as a panacea. "As with all things new, people who are doing it are saying that they're going to solve all problems," he says. "And the people who are not doing it are saying, 'well, show me.' Complexity is another step forward, but don't take it as the next great revolution."
Fuller disagrees. He thinks humanity is heading toward an ecological crisis, and a widespread understanding of complexity can help humans survive—but only if these ideas reach as many people as soon as possible. So he's made it his personal mission to teach complexity his way, to anyone and everyone who wants to learn.
Despite its name, the science of complexity can be understood in simple terms (see "Complexity: The Study of the Web of Life" on page 51). Essentially, it asserts that everything—from cells to organs to organisms to species to ecosystems to the planet—is linked. This idea isn't new; Buddhist and Hindu philosophies teach that all levels of life are interwoven. But the concept of interconnectedness as a scientific approach is a dramatic shift from the dominant science of reductionism, which examines the parts rather than the whole. Complexity offers a paradigm for science to envision a more holistic view of the world.
When Fuller encountered the nascent field in the 1990s, he was struck by its potential to link science-based issues with their ecological, social and economic counterparts.
"It was as if every other page in my textbooks had been blank," he remembers, "and these ideas were filling in the blanks."
As a dedicated instructor, Fuller wanted to close those same gaps for his students. Fuller insisted that there was too much disconnect between the wild complex nature out there and the tamed pieces of nature studied in labs. He wanted it so badly he squabbled with peers over college curricula. He refused to perpetuate what he saw as an antiquated perspective.
And he didn't want knowledge of complexity reserved for scientists and scholars alone. He wanted to see it woven into sixth-grade science lessons, high school economics classes and the general public's vocabulary.
He came to believe that those holding the old views would have to retire before the new views could be incorporated into academia.
He wasn't willing to wait that long.
In 2001, Fuller launched Prototista to spread the message that humans need to make huge changes, and make them now. As the school's only instructor, he offers courses on complexity and its applications to math, biology and geology.
ProtoTista doesn't feel like a classroom. There are no exams and no grades. There are no rigid chairs, no chalkboards, no microscopes or lab counters.
During a Complexity 101 class, rain drizzles on the building's steel roof. Up front, fifty-two-year-old Fuller is in his element. Teaching in a kilt and stretch pants, he alternately stands in the middle of the room and sits on a stool in front of his computer. He never stops moving.
The students sit on cushy chairs, mismatched couches and a pink rug that covers the cement floor. Tapestries and maps hang from the walls. Stairs lead to a blue meditation nook.
Fuller speaks with the precision of someone who's been misinterpreted too often; his cadence is steady, his words weighed carefully.
Backed by the meticulous work of Nobel Laureates such as Ilya Prigogine and Murray Gell-Mann, he guides a class of artists, activists, doctors, anarchists and retirees—ranging in age from seventeen to seventy—through a PowerPoint lecture projected like a movie on the front wall.
"IT WAS AS IF EVERY OTHER PAGE IN MY TEXTBOOKS HAD BEEN BLANK, AND THESE IDEAS WERE FILLING IN THE BLANKS."Fuller's class rules are simple: Be comfortable. Listen politely. Ask questions for clarification, but save lengthy discussions for the end of class at 9:00 p.m. Eat popcorn and drink tea, but wash your own dishes. Stay as late as 11:00 p.m., but then leave Fuller to his work.
He's a busy man, keeping an owl's hours to develop scrupulously researched lectures, essays and course materials. Midnight is his midday—he gets up around two or three in the afternoon and goes to sleep as late as sunrise.
Fuller makes no profit, living and teaching from money he inherited from a relative. He does it, he says, because he's committed to the subject matter and can't imagine doing anything else.
So far, his effort has paid off—more than one hundred students have studied at ProtoTista. One of those students, seventeen-year-old Carsie Blanton, appreciates Fuller's teaching style.
"He's very open to everyone's ideas and there's very little dismissal happening," she says.
While Blanton struggles with some of the mathematical components, she's excited about complexity and hopes it will lead those who study it to make more careful decisions.
"There's a possibility that science is no longer geared toward building these quaint little models of the world and playing with them," she says, "but, rather, actually understanding ourselves as a part of something that's a lot bigger than we are."
While Fuller acknowledges complexity's possibilities for changing the world outside the field of science, he prefers to save discussions of its intersections with politics, spirituality and art for after class.
"I insist on distinguishing between what is science and what is not," he says. "I'm a pretty hard-core science thinker."
Yet, it is in the interest of hard-core science that Schombert says he would be reluctant to introduce complexity to laypeople. He teaches it in detail only to the most advanced science students at the University of Oregon because, he says, people tend to misinterpret concepts they don't fully understand.
"It's a very common mistake to take science terms and start applying them loosely," he warns.
Fuller, on the other hand, thinks most people can handle the concepts if they have the proper context.
In the science of complexity, the context can be found not in a lab but in the planet itself. Fuller says that without that understanding, he fears humnaity's disproportionate impact in the web of life will be catastrophic. There is no time to waste.
"I feel compelled to help people understand that the time is later than we think. It's time to move," he says soberly.
Framed by his huge glowing lecture notes on the wall, Fuller looks powerful, but his answers are fragile.
"I hope that what we're doing now is laying the seeds for a peaceful and ecologically sustainable future that humans are a part of," he continues.
He wants to believe it can happen.
Ever since the scientific revolution—the days of Copernicus, Descartes and Newton—the dominant Western metaphor for the universe has been that of a machine. In this metaphor, the way to understand something is to break it down and study its parts. This view, called mechanistic reductionism, is still the ruling foundation of science. And while geneticists share campuses with ecologists, there is not much communication between those disciplines. Parts of nature are studied separately, without much analysis of the integrated whole.
Complexity, an emerging approach to science, replaces the machine metaphor with a web metaphor. By emphasizing the interconnectedness of life at all levels, complexity asserts that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's a network approach to science, connecting biology, anthropology, sociology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology and economics. If complexity becomes a mainstream way of looking at the world, humanity will see a lot more collaboration across disciplines.
Complexity suggests that because the planet is a complex web of causes and effects, the more angles through which we view problems, the more equipped we will be to find comprehensive solutions. Looking at human population growth through the lens of complexity, for example, we will examine its links to economic, ecological and political instability. The concept can also be applied to subjects like deforestation, disease and fluctuations in the global economy. For example, if the problem is a malaria-carrying mosquito, the reductionist solution might be to spray DDT—it kills the mosquito. But a complex approach would first ask how DDT might affect all the other things in an ecosystem.
Hundreds of respected scientists—including Ilya Prigogine, James Lovelock, Fritjof Capra and Lynn Margulis—have contributed to the field of complexity. Born from advances of quantum theory and cybernetics in the mid-1900s, complexity was developed more intensely in the 1970s and 80s, when scholars began to draw connections between advances in mathematics, biology, computer science, physics and ecology. In 1984, four Nobel Laureates helped found the Santa Fe Institute, an organization dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of complexity.
Also referred to as "nonlinear dynamical systems theory" or "network theory," complexity involves many new scientific terms and theories. Gaia theory, which uses geology and global climate modeling, views the planet as a single evolutionary process. Symbiogenesis, in contrast with Darwin's evolutionary theory, proposes that new species evolve from relationships between existing species. For instance, lichens living on trees and rocks evolved from independent algae and fungi. Another idea in complexity, called emergence, suggests that new properties surface as you examine things at different levels. For example, the atoms in a chlorophyll molecule don't look green, no matter how you view them, but the green color emerges when the atoms come together to form the molecule. The mathematical face of complexity includes chaos theory and fractal geometry, which graph complex patterns in nature. Bifurcations occur when small changes lead to dramatic transformations, the way that slow movements of tectonic plates lead to earthquakes. These moments happen on the edge of chaos—the border between chaos and order on a mathematical graph.
The bottom line in complexity: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Proponents of the emerging field hope that this awareness may help humanity to see more clearly in a time of ecological and social change.
