Heroes Not Zombies

I wish someone could come up with a better name for this branch of knowledge and enquiry – calling it “complexity science” makes it seem so, well, COMPLEX! But actually it isn’t! It’s only the science of understanding reality in the raw. By that I mean understanding how natural and living systems function in the real world – in their connectedness and embeddedness. It’s the opposite of reductionism which takes the approach of breaking something down into small pieces (which actually don’t ever exist by themselves) and understanding the pieces as a way of understanding the whole.

I was interested to find this little article on Science Daily recently which mentioned the University of Vermont’s “Complex Systems Center”. It’s good to hear of universities bringing resources to bear on this area and I wasn’t surprised to hear it was part of their engineering and math Faculties. I do hope more universities expand their work on complexity and I wish more were multidisciplinary bringing together both physical and biological sciences with humanities.

The Center Director said –

“In its most simple form, a complex system is many distributed parts interacting in some distributed way,” Dodds says, “giving rise to some interesting, often unexpected, macrophenomena.”

and this reminded me of Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi – I swear this is one of the most exciting books I’ve read this year and that if you want to begin to explore this whole area I couldn’t recommend any other better starting point than this. Read my review here first – but then go get the book!

The Science Daily article led me to explore the University of Vermont site. Here’s the link to their Complex Systems Center. And here’s a link to a video about “emergence” on the “PBS” site – and you’ll find links to John Holland of the Santa Fe Institute there (one of THE major thinkers and researchers in this area).

I hope you enjoy some of these resources – this really is a fascinating area of study. As best I can see, this is a MAJOR way forward to help us better understand our world and our lives.