Complexity Science and World Affairs

Chapter One: Why a Science of Complexity?

1 “Quarks are simple but jaguars are complex,” explained the Nobel laureate in physics and pioneer in complexity science Murray Gell-Mann (1994). So too, the inner workings of a cell in a worm are more complex than those of the sun. A survey of particle physics research finds that the “universe is a complex and intricate place” (Lincoln 2012). Humans are even more complex than worms or jaguars—especially in world affairs as individuals and groups of humans deal with one another across borders of culture, language, politics, and geography. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it 1847, “The last lesson of modern science is that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures”—quite the opposite of the wheel insect, volvox glob. The difference between complexity and complication was made clear in an essay by Daniel Barenboim on Richard Wagner (New York Review of Books, June 20, 2013). “Wagner’s music is often complex, sometimes simple, but never complicated.” Complication implies “the use of unnecessary mechanisms or techniques that could potentially obfuscate the meaning of the music. These are not present in Wagner’s work.” By contrast, complexity in Wagner’s music is represented by multidimensionality—“many layers that may be individually simple but that constitute a complex construction when taken together.” When Wagner transforms a theme, he does so by adding dimensions. “The individual transformations are sometimes simple but never primitive. . . .” Wagner’s “complexity is always a means and never a goal in itself.” chapter one Why a Science of Complexity? 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 2 C O M P L E X I T Y S C I E N C E A N D W OR L D A F FA I R S Human society and culture did not just drop from the sky but, like other human activities, arose from beings and processes shaped by millions of years of evolution (Wilson 2012). Humans and the estimated seven million other animals who now roam the planet, from the ocean floor to the highest mountains, evolved from single-celled ancestors who, some eight hundred million years ago, probably resembled today’s Capsapora owczarsaki, a tentacled, amoeba-like creature barely noticed by scientists until 2002. Animal bodies can total trillions of cells, able to develop into muscles, bones, and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types. From single cells arose a vast kingdom of complexity and diversity (Zimmer 2012). Humans, however, are not just “wet robots” (Dilbert’s term) and social science is not just biology or physics. Still, those who seek to understand political life need an approach to scientific inquiry with strong links to the life and other sciences. They must consider human affairs in the context of other animate and inanimate activities across a shrinking planet. Scientists from many disciplines now mobilize to study the most complex object in the known universe, the human brain. The brain activity mapping project sponsored by the U.S. government, starting in 2013, and conducted at several universities will study how the brain is wired at all levels—from individual nerve cells to the neuronal superhighways between its various lobes and ganglia. The project will institutionalize the emerging science of connectomics. Brain mapping and the human connectome project should shed light not only on mental processes but also on mental disease, brain injuries, and psychopathologies. The Complexity of Interdependence The complexity of global interdependence demands a science of complexity to fathom it. The essence of life is interdependence—every element dependent on every other. Walt Whitman depicted this reality in his Salut au Monde: Such gliding wonders! Such sights and sounds! Such join’d unended links, each hook’d to the next, Each answering all, each sharing the earth with all. . . . I see the shaded part on one side where the sleepers are sleeping, and the sunlit part on the other side, I see the curious rapid change of the light and shade, I see distant lands, as real and near to the inhabitants of them as my land is to me. A few years before Whitman composed his Leaves of Grass, Karl Marx in 1848 described how global economics intensified the planet’s “unended links, each hook’d to the next.” And long before Thomas L. Friedman (2007) argued [3.146.105.137] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 11:23...