Complexity Science and World Affairs

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2 1 3 Chapter One. Why a Science of Complexity? 1. Unlike the administrators of The Hunger Games, who sponsored assassination and civil war to allocate scarce resources among their subjects, Roth and Shapley developed algorithms showing how best to bring contending parties together for mutual benefit. They pointed the way to stable outcomes—allocation of benefits in cases when there are many possible options but the parties perceive no gain from seeking a different match. 2. Healthy heartbeats display a complex set of multifractal properties while heartbeats of people with congestive heart problems are generally monofractal (McNeil 1999; also Goldberger 1996; more references at www.physionet.org). 3. Cohen and Stewart (1994, 3) contrasted “simplicity” with “complicity.” The first refers to “the tendency of simple rules to emerge from underlying disorder . . . in systems whose large-scale structure is independent of the fine details of their substructure.” By contrast, “complicity is the tendency of interacting systems to coevolve in a manner that changes both, leading to a growth of complexity from simple beginnings—complexity that is unpredictable in detail, but whose general course is comprehensible and foreseeable.” The authors maintain that simplicities of form, function, or behavior emerge from complexities on lower levels because of external restraints. Simple rules emerge from underlying disorder and complexity in systems whose large-scale structure is independent of the details of their substructure. See also Casti 1994 and Buchanan 2000. 4. Goethe, according to Emerson, regarded a leaf, or the eye of a leaf, as a key unit of botany, and saw that every part of the plant was only a transformed leaf to meet a new condition; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted into any other organ, and any other organ into a leaf.” In like manner, in osteology, Goethe assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be considered the unit of the skeleton; the head was only the uppermost vertebra transformed. “The plant goes from knot to knot, closing, at last, with the flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot, and closes with the head. Men and the higher animals are built up through the vertebrae, the powers being concentrated in the NOTES 2 1 4 N O T E S T O C H A P T E R O N E head.” In every field Goethe went to the core. In optics “he rejected the artificial theory of seven colors, and considered that every color was the mixture of light and darkness in new proportions.” 5. For complexity science at the Santa Fe Institute, see http://www.santafe. edu/; at the New England Complex Systems Institute, http://necsi.org/necsi/; at the Northeastern University Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems, http://www.circs.neu.edu/; at the Northeastern University Center for Complex Network Research, http://www.barabasilab.com/; at the George Masson University Center for Social Complexity, http://socialcomplexity.gmu.edu/; at the European Union’s Complex Systems Network of Excellence (EXYSTENCE), www.complexityscience. org; at the Department of Biology, Calgary University, http://www.bio.ucalgary.ca/; at the Center for Complex Systems Research, University of Warsaw, http://www.iss. uw.edu.pl/osrodki/obuz/OBUZNEW_ENG/obuz.htm. In Paris, Edgar Morin (2008) was a virtual center. 6. Quantum physics once seemed like the last nail in the coffin of pure reason. According to George Musser (2012), however, it provides a model for human behavior in which irrationality makes total sense. 7. Longo, Maël, and Kauffman (2012) argue that there is no place in biological evolution for the physics worldview of law-entailed dynamics. They point to the variability of the very contexts of life—interactions among organisms, biological niches, and ecosystems. These contexts are ever-changing, intrinsically indeterminate, and unprestatable. No one can know ahead of time the niches that constitute the boundary conditions for selection. Looked at broadly, the space of possibilities cannot be prestated mathematically. No laws of motion can be formulated for evolution. Life goes on in a web of enablement and radical emergence. Still, mutations and other causal differences put nonconservation principles at the core of evolution, unlike physical dynamics, based largely on conservation principles. A conceptual frame of “extended criticality” (discussed below in chapter 2) can benefit the study of life processes. 8. Later on, as weaponry became less dependent on physical strength, women too could pull triggers and push buttons to kill. In...