The Evolution of Complexity
The Violet Book of `Einstein Meets Magritte'
Published on 31. July 1999
Book
Hardback
978-0-7923-5765-0 (ISBN)
Description
The Evolution of Complexity
is addressed to a broad audience of academics and researchers from different disciplines, who are interested in the picture of our world emerging from the new sciences of complexity. This book reviews the new concepts proposed by the diverse theories of evolution, self-organisation, general systems, cybernetics, and the `complex adaptive systems' approach pioneered by the Santa Fe institute. The thread which holds everything together is the growth of complexity during the history of the universe: from elementary particles, via atoms, molecules, living cells, multicellular organisms, plants, and animals to human beings, and societies. The different sections of the book discuss the foundations and philosophy of complexity evolution, its mathematical and computer models, its explanation of self-organising and living systems, the insights it provides into the origin of mind, language and culture, and its practical applications in areas such as management and system design.
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Content
What is Complexity? - The philosophy of complexity per se with application to some examples in evolution; B. Edmonds. The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity during Evolution; F. Heylighen. Involution: On the Structure and Process of Existence; D.M. Keirsey. The Nature, Development, and Destiny of Organization in the Universe; A. Mansueto. Physical Models of Biological Evolution; N. Vandewalle, M. Ausloos. A Simple Mathematical Theory of Evolution Showing that Taxonomic Complexity is a Logistic Variable; R.L. Coren. Diversity and Complexity: Two Sides of the Same Coin; J.B.C. Garcia, et al. Chaos in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science: Similarities and Dissimilarities; B. Codenotti, L. Margara. Metacomputation of Language Hierarchies; R. Glueck, A. Klimov. Eigenmechanism - An Explanatory Principle and an Artful Exemplar; J. Hu. Forgetting in Self-Organising Systems; B.C.E. Scott. Invertibility and the Evolution of Complex Systems; G. Nagarjuna. Lest We Forget Our Inheritance; A.J. Hirst. Mind as Evolution and Evolution as Such; R. Pallbo. The Evolution of Complexity in the Evolution of Language: grammaticalization, pidgin languages, and language acquisition; K.C. Diller. Memetics: On a conceptual framework for cultural evolution; H.C. Speel. Parasite Ecology and the Evolution of Religion; B. Cullen. Innovation, Increasing Complexity and the Need for a New Paradigm in Economics; B.H. Martens. Use of Complex Adaptive Systems in Organizational Studies; E.A. Garcia. Responsive Accounting: a grounding of the informational domain in the operational domain of an organisation; R. Espejo, A. Reyes. Application of Complexity Theories to Evolutionary System Development; G.S. Percivall. Cognitive Complexity vs. Connectivity: efficiency analysis of hypertext networks; J. Bollen. Index.