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In a rented convent in Santa Fe, a revolution has been brewing.
The activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics
such as Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, and pony-tailed graduate students,
mathematicians, and computer scientists down from Los Alamos. They've formed an
iconoclastic think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, and their radical idea
is to create a new science called complexity. These
mavericks from academe share a deep impatience with the kind of linear, reductionist
thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton. Instead, they are
gathering novel ideas about interconnectedness, coevolution, chaos, structure,
and order -- and they're forging them into an entirely new, unified way of thinking
about nature, human social behavior, life, and the universe itself. They
want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself
into the first living cell -- and what the origin of life some four billion years
ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. They want
to know why ancient ecosystems often remained stable for millions of years, only
to vanish in a geological instant -- and what such events have to do with the
sudden collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s. They want to know why the
economy can behave in unpredictable ways that economists can't explain -- and
how the random process of Darwinian natural selection managed to produce such
wonderfully intricate structures as the eye and the kidney. Above all, they want
to know how the universe manages to bring forth complex structures such as galaxies,
stars, planets, bacteria, plants, animals, and brains. There are common threads
in all of these queries, and these Santa Fe scientists seek to understand them.
Complexity is their story: the messy, funny, human story
of how science really happens. Here is the tale of Brian Arthur, the Belfast-born
economist who stubbornly pushed his theories of economic change in the face of
hostile orthodoxy. Here, too, are the stories of Stuart Kauffman, the physician-turned-theorist
whose most passionate desire has been to find the principles of evolutionary order
and organization that Darwin never knew about; John Holland, the affable computer
scientist who developed profoundly original theories of evolution and learning
as he labored in obscurity for thirty years; Chris Langton, the one-time hippie
whose close brush with death in a hang-glider accident inspired him to create
the new field of artificial life; and Santa Fe Institute founder George Cowan,
who worked a lifetime in the Los Alamos bom laboratory, until -- at age sixty-three
-- he set out to start a scientific revolution. Most
of all, however, Complexity is the story of how these scientists and their
colleagues have tried to forge what they like to call "the sciences of the
twenty-first century." M. Mitchell Waldrop received
his doctorate in elementary particle physics from the University of Wisconsin.
The author of Man-Made Minds,
a book about artificial intelligence, he spent ten years as a senior writer for
Science magazine, for which
he is now a contributing correspondent. He lives with his wife, Amy Friedlander,
in Washington, D.C. |
