This is a book about the science of complexity—a discipline so new and so vast that no one quite knows how to define it exactly, or even where its boundaries lie.And yet, that's what it's all about.If we say that the research field of complexity science is still vague, it is because this research is trying to answer questions that cannot be answered by all conventional disciplines.for example: Why did the Soviet Union's forty-year rule of Eastern Europe collapse within a few months of 1989?Why did the Soviet Union itself fall apart less than two years later?These of course have something to do with two people named Gorbachev and Yeltsin.But even the two men themselves seem to be swept away by events that are completely beyond their control.Is this because there is something global at work that transcends personal energies?

Why did the stock market plummet more than 500 percent on a Monday in October 1987?Many commentators blame the computerization of stock trading.But computers have been around for years, and is there any answer to why stocks were crashing on that particular Monday? According to the records of fossil specimens, ancient species and ecosystems often remained stable for millions of years, and then died out or evolved into new species at a certain moment in the geological period. Why is this?Maybe the dinosaurs were wiped out by the impact of asteroids, but there weren't that many asteroids at the time, are there other factors at play?

Why in a country like Bangladesh, even after free birth control is introduced, do rural families still have an average of seven children?Even the villagers seem fully aware of how they are suffering due to their country's overpopulation and stagnant development.Why should they still knowingly commit him to follow this pattern of behavior and get themselves into a disastrous situation? How did primitive liquid amino acids and other simple molecules transform into the first living cells four billion years ago?Molecules cannot be assembled randomly, but origin of life scientists relish the absurdity that this should not happen.Could the origin of life be a miracle?Or is there something in the liquid amino acid that we don't know yet?

Why did individual cells begin to assemble 600 million years ago to form multicellular organisms like seaweed, jellyfish, insects, and finally humans?And why do human beings spend so much time and effort to organize themselves into families, tribes, communities, nations and various types of societies?If evolution (or capitalist free markets) is really determined solely by the survival of the fittest, why do things happen that have nothing to do with brutal competition between people?In a world where good people often don't follow through, why is there such a thing as trust and cooperation?Why, despite all the circumstances, does trust and cooperation not only exist, but flourish and flourish?

How does Darwin's theory of natural selection explain intricate structures like eyes and kidneys?Is it true that the unbelievably exquisite organization we find in living organisms is just the accidental result of random evolution?Or was there something else at play four billion years ago that Darwin didn't understand? What is life?Is life nothing more than a special and complex carbohydrate?Or something more subtle?What exactly are things like computer viruses that we create?Are they mere imitations of annoying life?Or, in the most fundamental sense, are they really alive? What is the brain?How does the commonplace three-pound lump of the brain give rise to ineffable features like feelings, thoughts, purpose, and consciousness?

Perhaps most fundamentally, why is there always something and not nothing?The universe began as a dank chaos after the big bang, but from then on, as described by the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is subject to an indomitable tendency toward chaos, disintegration, and decay.But it also produces structures everywhere: galaxies, stars, planets, bacteria, plants, animals, and brains.What's going on here?Is it because there is some counterbalance between the eternal compulsion towards chaos and the equally powerful compulsion towards order, structure and organization?If so, how do these two forces work together?

At first glance, the only thing these questions have in common is that they all have one answer: "No one knows."Some problems don't even look like scientific problems at all.But when you look at them further, you realize that these problems actually have a lot in common.For example, they all belong to one system, the complex system.In other words, many independent factors interact in many ways.For example, millions of proteins, fats, and cellular nucleic acids interact chemically to form living cells; another example is the brain composed of billions of interconnected nerve cells, and thousands of interdependent individuals. composed of human society.

And, in each case, these endless interactions lead to spontaneous self-organization of each system as a whole.This is the case when people unconsciously organize themselves into a certain economic system through countless individual buying and selling behaviors in the process of trying to satisfy their material needs.This is not something that happened under someone's responsibility or conscious planning.Again, genes assemble themselves in one way into liver cells and another way into muscle cells in a developing embryo; Bodies often adapt to each other and evolve, thus combining themselves into exquisitely coordinated balanced systems; atoms find the smallest energy state by combining with each other, so that they form themselves into structures called molecules.In all these cases, groups of individual agents transcend themselves in one way or another in their search for mutual adaptation and self-perpetuation, and thereby acquire life, thought, purpose, an integrated unity that never could have been possible as individual agents. feature.

Furthermore, these complex, self-organizing systems are self-adjusting.In this self-regulation, they are not merely passively reacting to events as rolling stones in an earthquake do.They actively try to turn everything that happens to their advantage.Thus the human brain is constantly organizing and reorganizing its billions of neural connections to learn from experience (sometimes anyway); The same is true.Market changes in consumer tastes and lifestyles, immigration, technological developments.There is a constant response to changes in raw material prices and changes in a range of other factors.

Finally, every such self-organizing, self-regulating complex system has some kind of dynamic.This dynamic sets them apart from mere complex objects such as computer chips and snowflakes.Complex systems are more spontaneous, less ordered, and more active than they are.At the same time, however, this particular dynamic is a far cry from the bizarre and unpredictable spiraling state known as chaos.In the past two decades, chaos theory has shaken the foundations of science, enabling people to realize that extremely simple dynamic laws can lead to extremely complex behaviors, such as the overall beauty produced by countless small fragments, or the countless foams. The raging river formed.However, chaos theory itself still fails to explain the structure and cohesion, as well as the cohesion of the self-organization of complex systems.

But complex systems have the ability to blend order and chaos into a special balance.Its point of equilibrium—often called the edge of chaos—is the point where the elements of a system are never really at rest in one state, but never turbulent to the point of disintegration.The edge of chaos is the place where life is stable enough to sustain itself and creative enough to be worthy of the name; the edge of chaos is where new ideas and inventive genetics are constantly nibbling away at the status quo edge of the place.This is the place where even the most diehard conservatives will eventually be overthrown.Edge of Chaos is the moment when centuries of slavery and serfdom are suddenly replaced by the human rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; the moment when seventy years of Soviets are suddenly replaced by political upheaval; the evolutionary process The moment in which the immutable stability of the medium is suddenly replaced by the evolution of an entire species.The edge of chaos is a war zone that constantly shifts between stagnation and anarchy, the zone where complex systems can adjust and survive spontaneously. Complexity, adjustment, and upheaval at the edge of chaos—these common features are so striking that a growing number of scientists believe that there must be something more than a series of mere logical scientific analogies.The nerve center of this scientific movement is the think tank known as the Santa Fe Institute.Founded in the mid-1980s, the institute was originally housed in a rented convent on Kanyon Road in the Santa Fe arts district (the colloquium used to be a chapel).The researchers gathered here come from all walks of life and backgrounds, from graduate students with ponytails to the likes of physicists Murray GellMann, Philip Anderson and economists Nobel laureates like Kenneth Arrow, but they all reached a basic consensus, that is, they all firmly believe in a new science that will pervade nature and human beings—complexity theory.They believe that the intellectual boom of the past two decades in areas such as neural networks, ecological balance, artificial intelligence, and chaos theory has given them the mathematical tools to build this complexity-theoretic framework.They believe that the application of these new ideas allows them to understand the world of spontaneous, self-organizing dynamics from previously unknown perspectives and depths.This realization will have potentially huge implications for economic and business behaviour, and even political behaviour.They believed they were breaking sharply from the linear, reductionist way of thinking that had dominated science since the days of Newton.Their breakthroughs have enabled them to confront some of the biggest issues in the world today.What they believe they are creating is, in the words of Santa Fe Institute founder George Cowan, "science for the twenty-first century." This book is about their stories.