PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

1. SCIENCE AND FORETELLING
THE BELL-SHAPED CURVE OF THE LIFE CYCLE
Invariants are the simplest possible natural laws that exist for all time,
without a beginning, middle, or an end, and which could be visualized
as a straight line. However, there are natural laws with increasing complexity
but with invariant overall form having a beginning and an end.
Such is the law of natural growth over a span of time wherein a beginning
is linked with growth and a decline with death. Coming into and
out of existence is often called a life cycle, and its popular pictorial
symbol is a bell-shaped curve shown in Figure 1.2.
Originally used in biology, the bell curve illustrates that anything
with life grows at a rate which goes over a peak halfway through the
growth process. A sunflower seedling, for example, reaches a final
height of about eight feet in seventy days. The growth rate reaches a
maximum around thirty-five days. If Figure 1.2 were to represent the
rate of growth, it would have a time scale in days, so that “Birth” appears
at zero days, “Growth” at around twenty days, “Maturity” at
thirty-five, “Decline” at around fifty, and “Death” at seventy days, beyond
which no more growth is expected. If, on the other hand, Figure
1.2 were to represent the “life cycle” of a pianist’s career—expressed in
A LIFE CYCLE
Maturity
Growth
Decline
Birth
Death
Time
FIGURE 1.2 This bell-shaped curve is used across disciplines as a template for
the cycle of life.
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