The Perception of Complexity

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

  Artificial Intelligence   Complexity  

Open to the general public, and housed in the Print Room at London’s Natural History Museum, there is a collection of 36 copper engravings by the English ornithologist John Gould depicting a variety of finches, some of which are available as a digital download or even as a jigsaw puzzle.

Known as Darwin’s finches, the striking diversity of species depicted by Gould in this group led Charles Darwin to record in The Voyage of the Beagle in 1845 that “seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”

The speculative conclusion that Darwin drew from his observation of these Galapagos finches, succinctly summed up in those final 10 words, was to radically alter our understanding of how every species on the earth gradually evolves and adapts to its environment over time. The fact that Darwin was able to do that—to find a way to grasp the complexity of natural selection—is partly attributable to a cognitive ability that we all share, one that natural selection has itself shaped.

Today, this very same capability is shaping how artificial intelligence is extending our ability to understand complex systems and environments, such as one might encounter in …

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