Customer Reviews

Self-Organization in Biological Systems: (Princeton Studies in Complexity)

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Many books containing theory upon theory about self-organization in the biosphere have appeared in recent years. This book could be an important catalyst towards putting more of these theories to the test. While it has long been recognized that self-organization could be important in biological systems, many of these studies are computational models only. Many are very convincing, but unless steps are taken towards verifying these models and scrutinizing their validity, it is very difficult to know whether the theories have any real value towards understanding real life.

The strenght of this book lies in its rigorous introductions to the relevant theoretical concepts in self-organization, followed up by a general debate of self-organization versus competing explanations. The book spends many chapters looking at particular natural phenomena in detail, and examines possibilities for self-organization in these. In spite of the fact that these chapters have different authors, they follow each other well. The book is unusually well put together for this kind of collection of works by multiple authors.

The majority of the case study chapters involve studies of social insects, which narrows the topic a little in comparison with the more ambitious title. Self-organization also occurs elsewhere in biology, and personally I am a little dissapointed that a wider range of case studies were not chosen for the book. This could have spawned more interest and further work in other areas of the field.

However, the book is definitely well worth reading for biologists and other scientists interested in self-organization, and represents a major step towards establishing studies of self-organization in biology as a serious field.

I strongly agree with everything the reviewer above had to say.... with one caveat. At several points in the text, the authors refer to programs that apparently were available on the web when the book first appeared. If anyone out there knows where that site migrated, you'd be doing the readers of this book a great service by letting us know.

Otherwise, this is a very interesting text, well worth it.

This book is a wonderful treatment of self-organization in biological systems (as per title...) The writing is extremely accessible and the case studies very illuminating. One of the great virtues of the studies in here is how careful the writers are of making hasty assumptions in modeling complex systems and self-organization. They are explicit about the limitations of each model and the assumptions built into each. I found it to be a very responsible text in a field that has been booming with publications often striding from one hasty assumption to the next.
Another property I found very valuable, as someone interested in emergence and complexity in human systems, is the description of other kinds of organizational processes that, while many may not appear in cellular slime molds, may occur more routinely in human society. For instance, one of the chapters on wasps (I believe it was on nest construction) discussed the role of stigmergy (response to work done) in the construction of nests, which would be different than the common multi-agent self-organizing processes assumed for many of the models. This further suggests the intellectually responsible methodology of the authors. Excellent book and a fun read!

I buy a used book, but I cannot find out any difference with a new one!
The shipment was much quicker than I expect. It was supposed to be delivered with 6 week, but I got it within 2 weeks.