The early bird catches... one worm

Under idealized circumstances, problems not only have a solution but that solution is also demonstrably the only one and the correct one. That is why we engineers often try to address problems by starting with an idealized version. However, once you get into real life, the problem becomes way more complex and the quest for an answer very frequently ends up in "it depends". Take something as simple as the shortest path for going from point A to point B: in a piece of paper the undisputed answer is the (single) straight line going through both points. But when you locate the points in a city you start to introduce obstacles that change the problem in dramatic ways. To start with, if the distance is big enough the curvature of the Earth means that the shortest path takes you underground: although that solution is not technically impossible, it is likely that you were not planning on spending millions to dig a trench across town, so probably you would settle for the shortest path above the surface.

Even if you restrict the problem to be above the surface, it happens to be populated by a number of buildings whose tenants would no be too happy to see you cross their shop or their backyard, so instead you start to look for the shortest path above the surface and respecting property limits. But when you consider the buildings it is likely that the shortest path above the surface becomes one above the buildings: take off with a helicopter at your point of origin, fly in a straight line to your destination and then land. Here we meet again with additional limitations because most of us mortals do not own a helicopter that we can use to go shopping, plus there are certain limitations as to when and where helicopters are allowed to fly, so we have to re-formulate our problem to find the shortest path over ground and respecting property limits. And we could continue adding constraints, such as traffic regulations, rush hours, walking or driving route, avoiding dangerous parts of the city, etc. In the end, the problem really complex and it is likely to have different solutions for an adult male driving a car, for a kid in his bicycle and for a group of girls riding a cab, with each solution being optimal in a certain way, but unusable in other circumstances.

Photo: ellenm1

Life is not any less complicated and the question to the answer of life (how to survive and reproduce ourselves) has had millions of correct answers over time, one for each animal and plant species that there has been. Each one was, or continues to be, a valid solution for the kind of life and environment in which they live. In fact, the extension of a species in space and across time is determine by when and where its answer to the question of life becomes "insufficient" and the species cannot extend itself.

One funny aspect is that most of the times species "stick to their choice" with respect to their way of life. Mammals keep their lungs even when they turn aquatic, birds have hollow bones even whey they are not able to fly and so forth. They can "copy" the ways of living of similar species (think of the nightingale having eggs that look like those of other birds), but they certainly cannot take a hard turn. Except in the case of humans.

Humans have, by virtue of their communication capabilities and their ability imagine potential outcomes, the freedom of considering several possible courses of action and choose every time the most promising. We have discussed in the past how this election is intellectually costly, because it requires defining a metric by which the different endings will be judged, then playing each option forward to see how it ends, analyzing the final situation in view of the intended results, and then choosing the option which holds the most promise. And then we learn from the actual outcome, judging if our call was right (increasing our inclination to repeat our choice in the future) or not (requiring a new analysis, possibly discarding the option that already proved itself as deceptive).

Because this decision-making is costly, it s not infrequent that, after one passable election, we do not bother with exploring other options: we have learned our lesson and our previous decision works, so why risking a different way. Furthermore we can also learn from someone else's experiences (it is not frequent, but there have been a few trustworthy reports, ahem) and just adopt the so-called "common sense": a number of usual practices that have shown to work well enough for the community at large, saving us the effort of having to think about other ways.

In societies where mutual support is essential to the subsistence of the society as such, identification of the members with the group and vice versa is a crucial part of the culture. If a flood hits a village, the people who have been spared are more likely to help those attending their church than those attending another church or no church at all. That is why self-selected homogeneous communities are very frequent in history. And popular sayings actually tend to reinforce this attitude: "the early bird catches the bird" was forged way before we new that there are morning people and evening people, and as such encourages the former over the latter for the sake of uniformity and social peace.

However, once the societies grow larger, some of the usual solutions to the question of life start to be insufficient: either they are not enough to provide the whole society or, by pure statistics, there is a number sufficiently big of "outsiders" for whom that solutions is not OK. Getting up early in the morning might be OK for a lot of people but, as with birds, night owls also manage to find their prey in the night and thrive. Both are valid solutions to the question of life and catching a mouse in the evening is just as good a way of life as catching the worm in the early morning. And besides diversity improves the chances of a group surviving a sudden environmental change. Not all might make it through the change, but some ways are likely to be less affected by the sudden change than others (or even helped), and allow the society to continue to exist.

The current COVID pandemic has also brought to the spotlight how important this diversity is: even if the sporty types have sourly missed their daily jog, those who had always been happy staying at home have endured the lock-down without much effort. The chances are that the situation will revert to almost normal by the end of the year, but things could have gotten even worse. How has it affected you all? Are you a wild cats or a house mice? Have a nice week.