Customer Reviews

Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality

This book is a compendium of papers, most from members of the Sante Fe institute. That is, the papers are by the self-proclaimed "experts" in the field of complex adaptive systems (complexity as it is termed by some). Although published in 1999 it is mostly out of date as a reference but it stands as testament to something I think is more interesting than pure science.

What we have here is a prime example of how dogma (religion) begins and sadly, impedes any chance for progress. At this point, perhaps I should suggest that anyone reading this who hasn't heard of Kuhn, Wittgenstein and Prigogine to go and read a bit. And then you need to understand that we have completed the whole genome-mapping fiasco and "discovered" something that goes against what the high gods of complexity, genetics and evolution have been preaching: we don't have more than 100,000 genomes we have 30,000.

Ok, now back to the book. The papers, as I stated, are out of date. All interesting results here are tied back to the "magic" number of 100,000 genomes. That is simply due to the fact that according to the diverstity of cells and specific proteins in our bodies combined with present theories we need that many. So one would think, right away, that any new theory that is "more correct" than the old ones would quickly point out this large discrepancy.

Well, no one did find this. Instead they just muddle around withsome nifty math and even more exciting computer simulations and then settle back to make pronouncements. And what bombastic statements the high priests of complexity pronounced! The best part of this book are the transcripts of discussions about the papers from the big names, notably Gell-Mann, Anderson and Kauffman.

One would think that a bit of reading in philosophy would really have helped this lot to see beyond their noses. That is, how can there be a "true science" (uttered by one during a discussion) when science is simply a compression of knowledge and the whole idea of "truth" implies more compression? This is laughable when your own theory says that you can never tell if something is optimally compressed (just read Chaitin and Kolmogorov); I ask again, how do you know you have a "true science"?

Yes, egos are rampant here and it is enough to make you alternately laugh and then cry now that we see how far off the mark the "science" is. There are slights on Freeman but really, Freeman has more "science" ("theory that matches observation" to quote Gell-Mann) than anyone in this collection. In fact, Anna Wise has more science in her books about brainwaves than this group.

Disappointed? You bet. I fail to see how winners of Nobel prizes and "Genius" awards could end up being so far off the mark. So in the end, I can only rate the intended content (science) as "2 stars" but the high comedy and drama make the historical content worth 5 out of 5. Enjoy it for that only!