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What is complexity? Complexity theory holds that at the root
of all complex systems, from the behavior of molecules to
the actions of nation-states to the balance of nature, lies
a set of rules that when identified will yield a grand unification
of the life sciences.
Complexity:
Life at the Edge of Chaos is about the search for those rules. In it, prize-winning
author Roger Lewin personalizes one of the century's most dramatic stories of
scientific discovery. The map of his journey, from a hillside overlooking Chaco
Canyon in the New Mexico desert to the Devonshire moors, from a Costa Rican rainforest
to America's most sophisticated laboratories, is ornamented with some of the world's
most innovative scientific thinkers as they come to grips with life at the edge
of chaos: - Chris Langton, who survived a life-threatening
accident to explore complex adaptive systems as seen in the growth and collapse
of the Anasazi culture of the American Southwest... and, by extension, the rise
and fall of all nation-states;
- Edward O. Wilson
of Harvard, creator of the discipline of sociobiology, who finds emergent order
in the activities and evolution of ants and all of life;
- Stephen
Jay Gould and Brian Goodwin, locked in a debate about evolution -- whether Complexity
and the edge of chaos reveal a sort of progress in the random flow of Darwinian
selection;
- Daniel Dennett, who searches for the
secrets of human consciousness as it emerges at the edge of chaos;
- James
Lovelock, biology's great outsider, whose Gaia hypothesis -- the ultimate demonstration
of emergent order, the cornerstone of Complexity theory -- remains the most controversial
scientific idea of our age.
Here are the pioneers
of the field and their struggles to gain acceptance: ecologist Tom Ray, theoretical
biologist Stuart Kauffman, mathematician Norman Packard, and physicist Murray
Gell-Mann. Here are cellular automata and ecological models, theories of evolution
and theories of history. And here is a classic in the making, a book to rank with
James Gleick's Chaos and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Roger
Lewin, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Liverpool, is one of the
best-known writers in the United States. Former deputy editor of London's prestigious
New Scientist magazine, for the past decade he was Research News editor
of Science, a top American science periodical. His most recent book, Bones
of Contention, was named the U.K.'s top science book for a general audience,
besting both Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and James Gleick's
Chaos. In May 1989, he received the first Lewis Thomas Award for Excellence
in Communicating Life Science. |
