But the machine kept going. People who lack a pancreas, a second kidney, a small intestine, may not run marathons, but they live. Indeed, warding off disruption is the principal property of complex systems. Animals and plants in the wild regularly survive drastic violence and injury. The only study I know that has tried to measure the rate of injury in the wild focused on Brazilian lizards and concluded that 12 percent of them were missing at least one toe.
Elk survive gunshot wounds, seals heal after shark bites, oak trees resprout after decapitation.
In one experiment gastropods whose shells were deliberately crushed by researchers and returned to the wild lived as long as uninjured controls. The heroic achievement in nature is not the little fish that gets away, but that old man death is ever able to crash a system. Networked complexity inverts the usual relation of reliability in things. As an example, individual switch parts in a modern camera may have 90 percent dependability. Linked dumbly in a series, not in a distributed way, the hundreds of switches would have great unreliability as a group-let's say they have 75 percent dependability.