Complexity - M. Mitchell Waldrop

The main thrust of science in the last three or four hundred years has been reductionist. You take a phenomenon, strip away any extraneous details, anything messy and unmanageable and, applying a good dose of maths, create a theory to explain and predict. It works of course, science has progressed enormously and we see the fruits of science in applications all around us. However this focus on reducing a theory doen to its bare essentials means that for the most part science is no good at dealing with many real world problems. An example is the economy. Even with the enormous computing power at our disposal, and with reams of mathematical formalisms, the economy ...

The science of complexity deals with a wide range of phenomena which, at first glance, may appear to be totally unrelated: the economy, the human brain, evolution (biological and artificial), galaxies, and the weather to name but a few. However, all of these things have in common the fact that they are complex systems in which the interaction of the component parts results in the emergence of global properties, structure and organisation. Highly complex objects such as eyes, kidneys, flowers and galaxies arise by means of this interaction in a general process that is termed self-organisation. The book very naturally addresses highly profound questions such as: ...