Benedict (Red*) Rattigan is a writer, editor and lecturer, and founding Director of the Schweitzer Institute, a think-tank affiliated with Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. He is best known for developing dynamic symmetry theory (DST), which proposes that complex systems stay adaptive through a continually regulated relationship between stabilising order and exploratory variation.

DST provides a mathematical and conceptual framework for investigating common principles of stability and change across systems as different as molecules, coral reefs and cities. The Oxford physiologist Professor Denis Noble CBE FRS has described it as “one of the most deep theoretical insights you could have about the nature of the Universe… This simple insight is the sort of breakthrough we academics dream of.”

Rattigan’s close collaboration with Noble connects Noble’s work on harnessing stochasticity in biology with DST’s broader account of dynamic symmetry. Their dialogue has helped shape the project’s scientific direction.

The project began in 1990 with an intuition: lasting order arises neither from rigid regularity nor from pure randomness, but from a continuously adjusted relationship between the two. One of its earliest supporters was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman. Over more than three decades of slow, detailed work, the idea has grown from a private hunch into a body of ideas that engages a small but committed scholarly community.

Rattigan's theory has been the subject of conferences at Oxford University, the British Museum and the Royal Society. It has also led to an interdisciplinary Routledge volume, The Language of Symmetry, edited with Noble and co-authored by ten Oxford professors, and to a dedicated journal, OXQ: The Oxford Quarterly Journal of Symmetry & Asymmetry.

Founded in 2004, the Schweitzer Institute gives this work an institutional home in Cambridge. Through seminars, publications and the Schweitzer Fellowship at Peterhouse, it supports research in environmental ethics and dynamic symmetry and explores what they mean for science, ethics and policy.