What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? In this remarkably clear and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/) provides an intimate tour of the sciences of complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity), a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behaviour can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. Richly illustrated, Complexity: A Guided Tour—winner of the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science—offers a wide-ranging overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for its contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time.
Listen to the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time broadcast on complexity (2013) available as a podcast here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03ls154
368 pages in OUP USA paperback edition
ISBN 978-0199798100
Melanie Mitchell