Complexity

This concept is a scientific theory which asserts that some systems display behavioral phenomena that are completely inexplicable by any conventional analysis of the systems' constituent parts.

The story is not simple | Defining complex adaptive systems | Earth is complex | Complex | Science

Complexity is a way of seeing physical, chemical, geological, and biological phenomenon.

"These phenomena, commonly referred to as emergent behaviour, seem to occur in many complex systems involving living organisms, such as [ a school of fish, a herd of bison, a pod of whales ] a stock market or the human brain. For instance, complexity theorists see a stock market crash as an emergent response of a complex monetary system to the actions of myriad individual investors; human consciousness is seen as an emergent property of a complex network of neurons in the brain."

Evolution by means of natural selection, is an example of a process driven by emergent properties.

"Precisely how to model such emergence --that is, to devise mathematical laws that will allow emergent behaviour to be explained and even predicted-- is a major problem that has yet to be solved by complexity theorists.

The effort to establish a solid theoretical foundation has attracted mathematicians, physicists, biologists, economists, and others, making the study of complexity an exciting and evolving new scientific theory."

So says the Encyclopedia Britannica.

As science journalist, Freeman H. Judson suggests, "Scientists are building explanatory structures, telling stories which are scrupulously tested to see if they are stories about real life."

He writes that "Because of new information, we change the ways in which we view the world. We are not so much the center of things any more, because of science. We feel lost, or at least not yet found. We are not as informed about our role in the universe as we thought we were a few centuries ago."

The first giant step into complexity

came with the works of Charles Darwin in ethology, evolutionary biology and ecology:

"whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful & most wonderful have been and are being evolved."

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 417

The second giant step into complexity

came with the works of nuclear physics and atomic scientists.

Murray Gell-Man, the Cal Tech physicist who conceived of quarks,

He has said that:

"You know, frequently a theorist will even throw out a lot of data on the grounds that if they don't fit an elegant scheme, they're wrong."

a complex adaptive system
"In the course of biological evolution, random changes take place in the genotype from generation to generation."

( G.M., p. 65.)

"One general difficulty becomes apparent when we introduce the crude notion of a 'fitness landscape.' Imagine the different genotypes to be laid out on a horizontal two-dimensional surface."

( G.M. p. 249.)

"The conservation of nature, safeguarding as much biological diversity as possible is urgently required…."

( GM, 375.)

Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar.

The third giant step into complexity

"The same pattern of essential complexity comes when we interpret the Compton effect (the scattering of photons by electrons) in terms of wave mechanics. An encounter between a photon and an electron changes the frequency of both."

In other words, the fact that these two 'geometrical objects' occupy the same space at the same time has consequences for their 'temporal properties. Such an encounter is therefore not a mechanical collision, nor is it an optical reflection interpretable in terms of the mirror paradigm"

"is best described in the language of space-time."

G. Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, (1934), pp. 77-78.

What we need to conserve is complex;

that is life and the conditions under which or in which it thrives.

“The planet called Earth is a very unusual cosmic body.…Earth, however is anomalous.… a relatively tiny habitable sphere, suspended in the black emptiness of the heavens, hurtling at 30 kilometers a second in captive and delicately balanced orbit around the life giving but potentially lethal sun.”

Preston Cloud, Cosmos, Earth, and Man, p. 1.

"We seem helpless in the face of our own ability to devastate the globe."

E. M. Thomas, The Third Chimpanzee.

“We are intimately bound up with the rest of Nature.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. xii

Unity of the natural sciences

Paradox at the core of the sciences