My doctor, my financial planner and my trust attorney all roll their eyes when I tell them I intend to  live to 100, but I am dead serious.  Although I have yet to become a germophobic vegan gym rat, I am still drawn to click-bait like “10 ways to Live Longer and Better.” Beyond the no-smoking, moderate drinking, green leafy vegetable edicts, one standout is connections – being connected through healthy relationships is essential to longevity.  Seventeenth-century Englishman John Donne foretold this with his oft-quoted “No man is an island”, noting that we all rely on others in one way or another. 

Whether you believe that the physical world we inhabit was intelligently designed, or that it arose spontaneously through some improbable coincidence, it’s impossible to overlook many of the connections that surround us.  A few of them are fairly subtle and call for the discernment of experts.

One such legendary though elusive connection is explained by Dr. Ian Malcolm.

“It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems,” says Dr. M. “The shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.”

Dr. Malcolm’s credentials are well-established – he is the character played by actor Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park.  Whether or not a fly can produce the same effect by flapping its wings is left unsaid.

The technical term for this connection is Chaos Theory, which is based on the sensitivity of complex deterministic non-linear systems to small changes in initial conditions. Some of the confusion with respect to winged insects can be traced to the ad hoc father of Chaos Theory, meteorologist Ed Lorenz.  For the record, Ed actually said something to the effect that even if we could account for every single butterfly, we still couldn’t predict the weather.  If the flap of a butterfly wing in the Amazon really does cause a tornado in Texas, we will probably never know. <continue reading>