LEADER 00000cam  2200000 a 4500 
001    26310607 
003    OCoLC 
005    20130710081334.0 
008    920710s1992    nyu      b    001 0 eng   
010    92028357 
020    0671767895 
020    9780671767891 
020    0671872346 
020    9780671872342 
035    (OCoLC)26310607|z(OCoLC)808865192 
040    DLC|beng|cDLC|dMUQ|dTBS|dBAKER|dNLGGC|dBTCTA|dUBA|dYDXCP
       |dBTN|dZWZ|dDEBBG|dOCLCQ|dGBVCP|dC8F 
049    C8FM 
050 00 Q175|b.W35 1992 
100 1  Waldrop, M. Mitchell. 
245 10 Complexity :|bthe emerging science at the edge of order 
       and chaos /|cM. Mitchell Waldrop. 
260    New York :|bSimon & Schuster,|cc1992. 
300    380 p. ;|c24 cm. 
504    Includes bibliographical references (p. [360]-363) and 
       index. 
520 1  "In a rented convent in Santa Fe, a revolution has been 
       brewing. The activists are not anarchists, but rather 
       Nobel Laureates in physics and economics such as Murray 
       Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, and pony-tailed graduate 
       students, mathematicians, and computer scientists down 
       from Los Alamos. They've formed an iconoclastic think tank
       called the Santa Fe Institute, and their radical idea is 
       to create a new science called complexity." "These 
       mavericks from academe share a deep impatience with the 
       kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated 
       science since the time of Newton. Instead, they are 
       gathering novel ideas about interconnectedness, 
       coevolution, chaos, structure, and order - and they're 
       forging them into an entirely new, unified way of thinking
       about nature, human social behavior, life, and the 
       universe itself." "They want to know how a primordial soup
       of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first 
       living cell - and what the origin of life some four 
       billion years ago can tell us about the process of 
       technological innovation today. They want to know why 
       ancient ecosystems often remained stable for millions of 
       years, only to vanish in a geological instant - and what 
       such events have to do with the sudden collapse of Soviet 
       communism in the late 1980s. They want to know why the 
       economy can behave in unpredictable ways that economists 
       can't explain - and how the random process of Darwinian 
       natural selection managed to produce such wonderfully 
       intricate structures as the eye and the kidney. Above all,
       they want to know how the universe manages to bring forth 
       complex structures such as galaxies, stars, planets, 
       bacteria, plants, animals, and brains. There are common 
       threads in all of these queries, and these Santa Fe 
       scientists seek to understand them." 
520 8  "Complexity is their story: the messy, funny, human story 
       of how science really happens. Here is the tale of Brian 
       Arthur, the Belfast-born economist who stubbornly pushed 
       his theories of economic change in the face of hostile 
       orthodoxy. Here, too, are the stories of Stuart Kauffman, 
       the physician-turned-theorist whose most passionate desire
       has been to find the principles of evolutionary order and 
       organization that Darwin never knew about; John Holland, 
       the affable computer scientist who developed profoundly 
       original theories of evolution and learning as he labored 
       in obscurity for thirty years; Chris Langton, the one-time
       hippie whose close brush with death in a hang-glider 
       accident inspired him to create the new field of 
       artificial life; and Santa Fe Institute founder George 
       Cowan, who worked a lifetime in the Los Alamos bomb 
       laboratory, until - at age sixty-three - he set out to 
       start a scientific revolution." "Most of all, however, 
       Complexity is the story of how these scientists and their 
       colleagues have tried to forge what they like to call "the
       sciences of the twenty-first century.""--Jacket. 
650  0 Science|xPhilosophy. 
650  0 Complexity (Philosophy)