Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff laurenvog Obam here. The butterfly effect isn't just a movie from two thousand four. It's the idea that small, seemingly trivial events may ultimately result in something with much larger consequences. In other words, that small things have non linear impacts on very complex systems. For instance, when a butterfly flaps its wings in New York, that tiny change in air pressure could eventually cause a cyclone in Beijing.
In the aforementioned film, Ashton Kusher's character finds a way to travel back in time to his childhood. Every time he makes the journey, though, he does small things differently, and those tiny changes wind up having major and horrifying effects on his adult life. The term butterfly effect was coined the nineteen sixties by Edward Lawrenz, a meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was studying weather
path turns. He devised a model demonstrating that if you compare two starting points indicating current weather that are near each other, they'll soon drift apart, and later one area could wind up with severe storms while the other is calm at the time, Whether satisticians thought you should be able to predict future weather based on looking at historical records to see what had happened when conditions were the
same as they are now, Lorenz was skeptical. He was running a computer program to test various weather simulations, and he discovered that rounding off one variable from zero point five zero six one to seven to zero point five zero six dramatically changed the two months of weather predictions in his simulation. His point was that long range weather forecasting was virtually impossible, in large part because humans don't
have the ability to measure nature's incredible complexity. There are simply too many minute variables that can act as pivot points, cascading into much bigger consequences. As The Boston Globe wrote, the innumerable interconnections of nature, Lorenz noted, mean a butterfly's flap could cause a tornado, or, for all we know,
could prevent one. Similarly, should we make even a tiny alteration to nature quote, we shall never know what would have happened if we had not disturbed it, since subsequent changes are too complex and entangled to restore a previous state. So while people often think the butterfly effect means that tiny changes can have big consequences, and that we can
track this progression to see what change caused. What Lorenz was trying to say that we can't track those changes, and we don't really know exactly what would cause a weather pattern to go one way or another. Lorenz called this sensitive dependence on initial conditions when he introduced his work to the public in a nineteen sixty three paper titled Deterministic non periodic Flow. The term butterfly effect he coined later in speeches about the topic. The paper was
rarely cited by other researchers, at least at first. Later on, other scientists realized the importance of Lorenz's discovery. His insights laid the foundation for a branch of mathematics known as chaos theory, the idea of trying to predict the behavior of systems that are inherently unpredictable. You can see instances of the butterfly effect every day. The weather is just
one example. Climate change relatedly is another. For example, as it turns out, warming climates are impacting appropriately enough species of alpine butterflies in North America. We spoke by email with Alessandro Philozola, a community ecologist and data scientist and
postdoctorate fellow at the University of Alberta. He said climate change is expected to have some large impacts, such as too hot for some species or too dry for others, but there are nearly infinite amount of smaller indirect effects that will also occur. In our research, we looked at one of those indirect effects and saw how future climate will slowly cause mismatch in spatial location of a butterfly
and its host plant. As a caterpillar, this butterfly only feeds on this type of plant species, so any mismatching range will cause a decline in the butterfly. He adds that if we were to pause for a moment and think of all of the other species in a food web, suddenly there's the potential of many species being affected, not just one butterfly, but everything that eats it or that relies on the decay of its body for nutrients, and everything that eats those animals and fungi and plants and
everything that's in competition with it for resources. That's the butterfly effect in action on a large scale. When we start to consider how one small change can quickly result in a lot of unintended consequence. There's naturally cause for concern.
For example, limiting the construction of hydroelectric dams might reduce certain types of environmental damage, but in eliminating this potential source of clean energy, we tend to fall back on fossil fuels that accelerate global warming, and biofuel subsidies meant to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels have increased rainforest destruction and freshwater waste, and have lead to increases in food prices that have affected the poorest segments of the
human population. How can we possibly do much of anything in our lives then, without fear of causing harm? Philo Zola returns to the butterflies as an example. He said, better understanding of indirect effects is probably one of the most important steps in trying to mitigate those effects. More simply, though, just keeping nature as close to its original state is
really the most important thing. Ecosystems are vastly complex, and the loss of a single species might not have a perceived effect, but it could have cascading effects on the entire system. For another example, reintroducing wolves to yellow Stone park where they had previously been hunted out of their historical range, has wound up increasing beaver populations and increasing the number of willow and aspen plants, and provided food
for birds, coyotes, and bears, among other benefits. Then we have to consider how the butterfly effect can play into our individual lives. With nearly eight billion humans on the planet, can just one person make changes that echo around the earth? Phila Zola says that he does wonder about the indirect effects of his personal actions. He said, the items I buy, the people I interact with, the things I say I believe each can have their cascading effects that rippled through society.
That's why it's important to try and be a good person to create a positive influence. One thing I also think about is how these indirect effects are often not as small and removed as I believe many would think. Today's episode was written by an Than Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other small topics with big impacts, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio.
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