Complex perplexes
How did the primordial soup of amino acids and other molecules organise themselves into a living cell? How do galaxies and other structures form when there is an inexorable tendency towards disorder? Reductionist sciencc, which has held sway since the time of Newton - and has helped us gain an overall understanding of the universe - has been unable to answer these questions satisfactorily. Its inability to deal with these questions is fundamentally due to the fact that the behaviour of the whole is not necessarily derivable from that of the individual parts which constitute it. Be it the living cell or the economy, each of these systems have numerous agents (molecules in the case of the former and human beings in the latter) which interact with one other and organise themselves spontaneously into structures. The dynamics emerging out of the chaos is unique and very rich in structure. The study of the emergent dynamics is what is called complexity.
In 1984,1-eminent particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann along with M G M Cowan and others started the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico, us. The Institute - which many have called a haven for bored physicists! - has been the meeting point of a number of scholars from many fields, sharing the common interest of exploring complex systems. The approach is essentially interdisciplinary with computer scientists, neurobiologists, physicists and economists collaborating to gain insights into the new emerging dynamics of complexity.
M Mitchell Waldrop has written a wonderful account of the rise of this new threat to the reductionist paradigm. He offers a coherent, lively and compelling picture of this extraordinary intellectual adventure. Beginning with the founding of the Sante Fe Institute, he goes on to discuss the work of some of the key figures of the movement like S Kaufmann the biologist, Chris Langton the computer scientist, Brian Arthur the economist who pioneered the work on increasing returns and D Farmer the physicist, one of the pioneers in chaos. The book weaves together the personal and professional lives of these scientists. The prejudices of establishment- academia to radical ideas and the wheeling-dealing of the funding process, are subjects dealt with in the book. Although the book is a grip@ ping account of the notion of complexity, at the end of it one does feel Waldrop should have given us a slightly more detailed account of the science behind it rather than concentrating so much on the biographical details.
After having been an unchallenged concept for more than three centuries, reductionist science is now facing its biggest challenge in complexity. The universe may not any more be as -simple as we thought. On the other hand, the incredibly complex system that our universe is, it may well turn out to be amenable to scientific investigation.