Lynn Margulis is most famous as the biologist who, along with James Lovelock, came up with the Gaia hypothesis that the geological, atmospheric and biological processes on the Earth are so interconnected as to act as a single, living, self-regulating entity. She is also one of the leading post-darwinists. A growing number of geneticists, theoretical biologists, mathematicians, microbiologists, and computer scientists are attempting to move beyond darwinian natural selection. Before computers, science consisted of two facets, experiment and theory. First theory shapes an experiment, then the experiment proves or disproves the theory.
Computers provide a third way - scientific simulations.
A simulation is both a theory and an experiment. Since the advent of cheap, powerful computers the science of complexity has allowed for the exploration of post-darwinist dynamics. In this paper I shall explore how these dynamics push the evolution of complex adaptive systems along the edge of chaos, and try to give specific examples and uses relevant to language classes in general, and CALL classes in particular. Symbiosis -two organisms merging into one, or two working, simple systems merging into a larger, more complex system. In biology this is best observed in lichen or microbes, but in language a good example would be the evolution from a pidgin to a creole to a standard language.